Faith

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Before I discuss what faith is, it might be easier to begin by briefly discussing what it is not. Faith does not involve religious dogma, although some refer to their religion as “their faith.” Nor is it a blind acceptance of a set of rules and beliefs. Faith is something far beyond beliefs. Faith is a vibration of energy, and is probably the most powerful and yet most misunderstood energy that we have available to us as human beings.

Faith comes from contemplation, experience and a willingness—no, more than a willingness—a personal quest to probe and understand the deeper workings of life and our relationship with it. Faith and personal growth go hand in hand, and if you are honest, sincere and diligent in following the path of personal discovery, you will encounter the power and possibility of faith.

I have faith in myself and faith in the inner and outer workings of the matrix, and this has come from contemplation, experience and testing through trial and error to discover a system that produces consistent results in my life. Note I say consistent results, not guaranteed results; this is not a flawless system that produces one hundred percent results each and every time (beware of systems that promise this). However, I have discovered a system of beliefs and actions that help me navigate through life in both good times and bad, and this is what you must do as well. Discover and adopt your own system. A system that will turn your desires and goals into reality. A system that will come to your aid in your darkest hours. Something you can trust. Something you can have faith in.

One may use a religion as a source of faith, if you choose, but only if, through study and contemplation, you can distill the wisdom from the dogma and arrive at a workable system that applies to all aspects of your life. This cannot be a mere conceptual model; it must be one that has been tested in the fire of life and proven worthy of your trust and faith. It must produce results in your life. Noticeable results. Results that are so conclusive and consistent that there is little room for any doubt that your system works. And because it works, you can have faith in it.

When you resonate and vibrate with the energy of faith you are working with powerful energy. An energy that will supply you daily with hunches, insights, and ideas on which you can act. An energy that will propel you into action, and through action, will attract to you the people, circumstances, events, the synchronicity that will manifest that which you are vibrating faith in.

Faith is more than confidence. Confidence comes from what you can see and experience. Faith also has the wisdom of our intuition, which draws upon the higher spiritual laws. With faith one comes to see the beauty, harmony and truth of this intricate system of our life, and how cause and effect resonate throughout it, and how our thoughts and actions produce results. To know and understand how this works is to know and understand something great.

As I approach my fiftieth birthday (july 28th) and look back at the journey I have taken, it looks incredible, and yet it has a weave and pattern to it that is unmistakable. I have achieved success beyond my wildest imagination in all the areas of my life that are important to me. My health, my finances, my career, my marriage, my spirituality, my creativity, my love of travel and adventure. From this reflective stance of turning fifty and looking back forty years to where I entered my teenage years, I can see clearly not only what has happened, but why it happened—the causes and choices that propelled my destiny. It was not luck or chance that created such an interesting life, but rather the natural unfolding of laws that were understood and applied.

WHY DO I HAVE FAITH AND WHAT DO I HAVE FAITH IN?

I have faith because I have discovered that it is a powerful source of energy, and it has served me well, proving itself thousands of ways in my life. I have faith in following one’s passion because following mine has given me a fun, successful and interesting life. I notice also that all successful people follow their passion. I see a pattern there.

I have faith in the powers of the mind because when I use them regularly they work so astoundingly and so consistently that one would have to be a fool not to notice the effects they produce. And this is true not only of me, but of millions of people who follow the mind power system in this website. It is a system that works for everyone when they apply it.

I have faith in my inner voice (the still inner voice), my intuition and my dreams because they have led me and guided me throughout my life, and when I follow their guidance I am well served. This I have learned from experience.

I have faith in myself. The multi-dimensional self of body, mind, subconscious and soul. I know that each of these parts of who I am has wisdom and knowledge for me to use and apply in my life. I know this because I have used them and seen the effect. I know that when I am balanced with all aspects of my self I am in harmony, creative, inspired and filled with energy.

I have faith in the unknown, the unknowable and the mystery of life. I do not need to know and understand the fine intricacies of life to have faith in it.

I have faith in a higher power, whether I call it God, the universe, or the Great Mystery, and in a hierarchy of beings and dimensions that span far into eternity. And I know that I am a part of this grand and mysterious system, and an important part as well. Important and at the same time insignificant. This is part of the great paradox, and I am comfortable with this paradox.

In conclusion, let me say that faith is available to all who desire it, yet it cannot be given to you. You must create and develop it yourself, and it must be built upon your own personal discoveries, not other’s. It will work for you when you have faith in it, and it will be useless if it is not true and authentic to you. It must be your faith, and a faith that is tested and used and found worthy. Each of us is called to have faith in our own unique way, but not all of us heed this call. Rise to the challenge and utilize this great power and it will be of great service to you. When you possess faith, you possess one of the ten virtues, and much will be given to you from resonating with this energy.

THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND IS YOUR POWERFUL ALLY

The Subconscious Mind – A Powerful Ally

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Heidi Sorenson, a former Playboy Playmate, has a unique and interesting perspective on healing cancer. Not surprisingly, since she successfully healed herself of breast cancer. What is unique is her very strong belief in the power of the mind and the way she managed her own thoughts during her ordeal.

Speaking to her, you soon learn that remission is a four-letter word to her, as is the word survivor. “Survivor suggests the cancer has the power,” she asserts. As for remission, Heidi is equally adamant, “It’s dangerous for women with breast cancer to think of their recovery in terms of remission. It causes them to subconsciously think it will come back. I don’t believe that. I believe I once had cancer and that I don’t have it anymore.”

To many who are not familiar with mind power, this attitude might be thought to be naïve at best, and perhaps even dangerous, but Sorenson holds fast to her belief that positive thinking is the key to healing and health.

Sorenson, a Vancouver native, became a Playboy centrefold in 1981 at the age of twenty-one. Fifteen years and several careers later, she found a lump in her right breast. She was thirty-six. A health fanatic, she says the irony of being a former Playmate dealing with breast cancer was not lost on her, but she didn’t dwell on that. She was more concerned with her ten-month-old child. Heidi wondered who would look after her child if she died.

The estrogen-dependent cancer she was diagnosed with was the kind of breast cancer that doctors said responds best to chemotherapy and radiation. Sorenson was lucky – the cancer was caught at an early stage. Still, things were challenging because of the course of treatment she chose to take, or not to take is probably a better way to describe it.

After her lumpectomy, Sorenson’s doctors recommended chemo and radiation therapy. After researching alternative methods, and much soul-searching, she decided against both treatments. This resulted in much pressure from friends, doctors, everyone who was involved, but Sorenson was adamant, seemingly stubborn. In truth she was scared to death of the chemotherapy. “I was more scared of the chemo than I was of the cancer,” she admits.

She was determined to manage her own recovery, though she wasn’t prepared to use only her mind. While she believed strongly that her mind was a powerful ally in her healing, she looked for other resources as well. She detoxified her body, took nutritional supplements, and saw an acupuncturist who had previous success with cancer patients. “I had an intuitive feeling it was the right thing to do,” she says. He treated her intensely for a year, and periodically after that. Today she has been cancer free for five years.

But the acupuncturist, while very important to her, doesn’t get the credit for Heidi’s recovery. Sorenson, a devotee of the subconscious mind and a meditator for twenty years, believes her own thoughts saved her. Sorenson believes what sets humans apart is their ability to choose what they think and say. “We need to account for every word we speak,” she says. “If I say, I’m sick, I’m telling the subconscious mind that I’m sick. That is potentially damaging because the subconscious can’t take a joke. It manifests the thoughts we think about the most.”

Sorenson recalls that within five seconds of hearing her diagnosis, she had drafted an entire movie script imagining her death, her husband’s suffering, her motherless daughter, and her husband remarrying. She worried that the new wife wouldn’t be good to her daughter, or that her daughter wouldn’t like her. “I found myself getting mad at this fictional woman who was supposedly being bad to my daughter.”

But within weeks she had begun to expunge those thoughts from her mind and be positive. “I really worked on that through meditation, prayer and being completely conscious of my thoughts. It wasn’t easy. It’s like micro-managing your thoughts.”

Because she knows every patient and every cancer is different, Heidi would never recommend a no-chemo approach to other cancer sufferers, but she does recommend positive thinking as a complement to whatever path they take.

“Still, to this day,” she says, ‘I never entertain thoughts of illness. Never!”

Body Wisdom

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The body has its own wisdom and ways of knowing, separate and distinct from that of the mind. The mind thinks while the body feels. From each of these ways of knowing we get valuable information. Just as seeing and hearing are two totally distinct senses which supply us with discrete sensations, so too the body gives us different feedback than the mind. Our bodies have a special and unique relationship with the vibrating matrix of our reality, one which we can learn to tap into and be informed from.

Unfortunately our western culture has a history of misunderstanding this relationship. Instead of seeing our body as special, unique and a valuable part of who we are, the body is often dismissed as something less than the mind or soul. We have divorced ourselves from our body wisdom; the body’s feelings are now ignored and dismissed as unimportant or irrelevant. How have we let this happen?

Our religions are partly to be blamed; they mostly have been distrustful of the body, dismissing it as a temporary vehicle whose instincts and desires are to be ignored and overcome. There are countless stories of mystics and saints who flogged the body in order to keep it under control, so frightened were they of its powerful instincts and urges. But this seems illogical. From a spiritual point of view, if God has put us in a body, it is probably not for the purpose of fleeing or transcending it, but rather to learn from its mysteries, absorb its great wisdom and be nourished by it. But forget spirituality for a moment; just from a very practical point of view, if the body has access to wisdom and knowledge beyond what the mind can access, would it not be prudent to tap into this source of knowledge? If the body does have these capabilities and we are not listening to it, we are undoubtedly missing out on a lot. But does it?

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has done extensive research on the body’s ability to feel and process information. “The body contributes more than life support,” he writes. “It contributes content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind.”

One of Damasio’s most startling discoveries is how the feelings of the body influence rational thought without us even being aware of the process. Damasio devised an experiment that he called "the gambling task." It worked like this: Each subject was given four decks of special cards and with each card the player either won or lost money. The subjects were told to turn over the cards one by one from any of the four decks. What they didn’t know was that the decks were rigged. Two of the decks had higher payouts but more severe penalties. Choosing these decks eventually resulted in losses for the participant. The other two had lower payouts but much less chance of losing, so subjects ended up ahead by choosing from these decks. On average it took most participants fifty to eighty cards to figure out which decks had the greater chance of coming out ahead. And here is where it gets interesting. Damasio attached electrodes to subjects' palms and measured the electrical conductance of their skin. What he found is that after drawing only ten cards, their bodies understood which decks were the most advantageous to draw from and got “nervous” whenever they were about to draw from one of the negative decks. He knew this because the body registered increased levels of electrical conductance. The body figured it out much more quickly than the mind.

This extraordinary finding matches our own personal experiences. How many times in the past have each of us had strong feelings to either do or not do something that later proved to be accurate? For most of us the answer will be many times. Intuitively we have always known that trusting our feelings usually leads us in the right direction, even if we don’t always act upon it. But trusting our feelings takes on a whole new level of acceptability now that it has been scientifically proven to be accurate. The signals coming to us directly from the body are messages from our environment. Our body picks up this information and translates it to us as feelings. Learning the language of the body is simply a matter of being sensitive and in tune with our feelings. The more we learn to discern these unique body messages and act upon them, the more effective we become as human beings.

A friend of mine, a very successful psychologist, used to make all of his decisions logically. He thought his feelings were unreliable, mostly because he didn’t understand them. In a discussion with his wife one evening he shared with her how he distrusted feelings because, “They distort the facts.” His wife, an intuitive woman in touch with her feelings, looked at him incredulously and replied so simply and clearly that he understood for the first time what she had been trying to tell him for years. “David” she said, “Your feelings are the facts.”

Brilliant. Said so clearly and eloquently. Our feelings are the facts! Of course they are the facts. What else could they be? They have no hidden agenda. We feel what we feel. Never doubt the authenticity of your feelings. You may question your interpretation of what these feelings are telling you, but never the feelings themselves. They are as true a source of information as you can receive.

I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul

Walt Whitman knew from the depth of his being the wonder of the body. “The human body and the soul must remain an entirety,” he insisted, “This is what I feel in my inmost brain and heart.” Notice this isn’t a logical argument Whitman is presenting; he is “feeling” it. “I will not make poems with reference to parts/ but I will make poems with reference to ensemble.” Ensemble. What a beautiful descriptive word, for it says it all. Mind, body, subconscious and soul; you cannot take them apart, listening to some parts and not others. To do so is to miss something, for each is a part of who we are and each draws from its own source of wisdom, each touching and perceiving the universe in its own way.

Body wisdom is a wisdom that can only be felt. It bypasses reason and brings us feelings. Feelings are to be listened to and respected. If you cannot feel, you cannot access this knowledge. The more you feel, the more you can access this domain.

The heart, which is a dimension of body wisdom, possesses its own intelligence. “Have thy not hearts to understand,” the Koran calls out to us, pointing out that the intellect is not enough. And it is not enough. We cannot function effectively listening only to the mind. We become emotionally crippled, cut off from primal wisdom, one-dimensional, a distorted aberration of what a human being should be. Understanding this we take up the task to feel deeply. To feel the pain and frustration of others, to feel the loneliness of the elderly, to feel grief and disappointment and joy and gratitude. To feel it all and to feel it deeply, to let it all in, feeling ourselves and others and the human condition. We will never know the body’s wisdom without learning to feel our own innermost feelings, however frightening this may be at first. The path of body wisdom is the awakened heart, and the awakened heart feels deeply.

We patiently teach the mind these truths of body wisdom, and the mind, ever curious, listens and eventually (for we present it many times to the mind) understands. The mind needs to know and understand everything, so we use this as a carrot, approaching the mind with the concept of listening to the body and using this source of information, a source whose wisdom is unavailable any other way. Once the mind understands this and accepts the truth of body wisdom—and it will—it becomes receptive, even excited about learning the secrets of this new dimension. Feelings now are to be felt and heard and listened to. Suddenly the body is more than just a vehicle to host the mind. No longer just a mortal carcass or a mass of molecules and chemicals, the body becomes an exquisite living being unto itself, filled with mystery and wonder, something to be wooed and explored, much like one would with a new lover. The mind accepts that there is more than itself, and to know the world fully it must know and trust the body. When this happens the body and mind become friends, companions, fellow travelers in space and time, each with their own strengths, each complementing the other. At least this is the way it has unfolded for me, as I have explored my own body wisdom.

The Subconscious Mind: The Hidden Engine of Our Success

The Subconscious Has No Will of Its Own

Our subconscious mind has no will or agenda of its own. Its mandate and function is simply to manifest according to the beliefs and images that reside within it. It does not choose these beliefs and images, nor does it judge them. It will manifest prosperity just as easily as lack, sickness just as easily as health. Whatever resides within your subconscious is the blueprint to what you will experience in your life. To understand this is to understand something great. When we become conscious of this astounding truth, our next task is to discover what it is that we have residing within this all powerful faculty, for to know this much is to know the causes of everything that is happening to us.

Patterns Are the Hidden Footprints of the Subconscious

Each of us have certain patterns in our life that defy logic, and no matter how many times we try to change these patterns they seem to have a power of their own that overrides our best attempts. Whether it is the workaholic who tries again and again to relax and take time off, only to find himself back working all the time again, or the person who tries to get ahead financially and demonstrate abundance only to find herself stuck in the same financial situation, struggling with money. We achieve success in some areas of our lives, and yet in certain other areas we do not. Why is this?

In most cases the reason is simply that we have a subconscious pattern that overrides our best intentions and desires. Let me share with you a law: when your desires are in conflict with subconscious patterns, the subconscious patterns will always win. This is a law, and until you change the patterns within that are sabotaging you, you will not achieve your desires.