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  Higher-consciousness healing is so simple and so safe that most people can learn it easily from this book and practice it on their own without the help of a therapist. Over the years, I have received many grateful e-mails from people who report positive results from this method. Most of the case studies in this book, however, come from my own life-coaching practice, because I was able to monitor these cases more carefully and convince myself that the improvements were real. Here is the story of a man who used higher-consciousness healing all by himself.

  Andy

  After one of my talks about higher-consciousness healing, a man approached me and told me that he had overcome his depression simply by reading my book and doing the exercise. It was not difficult for Andy to receive his healing symbol—a red ruby—by asking his higher consciousness in relaxation. He then visualized his symbol in his heart whenever a low mood crept up on him. He felt the loving light of his symbol fill his body and mind, and comfort his hopeless spirit. Gradually, he felt better and better. When Andy spoke to me, he had been free of depression for six months.

  • • •

  There are very few prerequisites for using higher-consciousness healing. You do not need to be spiritual or religious. It is enough if you can simply trust that there is a part of your mind that is more loving and wise than your everyday self. However, if you are religious or spiritual, you can use your beliefs to practice this method without altering anything about them.

  Quite a few people worry that they can't visualize effectively. Fortunately, the kind of visualization you need for this method is so basic that anyone can do it. For example, look at a small object in front of you and study all its details. Now close your eyes and describe the object. If you can do this, you can visualize enough to use higher-consciousness healing effectively. You don't need to “see” everything as clearly as if you were looking at it on television. It is enough to think of your symbol, or just to “know” what it looks like. You can also make a simple drawing of your symbol and look at this image, without visualizing anything at all.

  Some people are afraid that higher-consciousness healing may bring up upsetting memories or a healing crisis (things getting worse before they get better). Fortunately, this is not true at all. In all the years that I have been using the method, I have found it to be completely safe and extremely pleasant to practice. In fact, one big advantage of this method is that it will not bring up distressing memories or upsetting material.

  Higher-consciousness healing is so simple that it can even be used by children (usually from age four onward) and I have regularly seen dramatic improvements in their physical and psychological well-being. It can also be used by parents on behalf of their smaller children.

  Thomas

  Thomas is the nine-year-old son of one of my clients. His mother taught him the simple practice of higher-consciousness healing. They practiced their respective symbols together each day. Thomas's first symbol aimed at improving his relationship with his stepfather. He was so successful that his stepfather remarked positively on the improvement, even though he didn't know anything about the practice. Then Thomas received a symbol to overcome his shyness at school and promptly felt a lot more confident. His mother told me that Thomas continues to use the method whenever he feels a problem arising—which has been greatly empowering for him.

  • • •

  Unfortunately, sometimes not everyone wants to solve their problems in such a quick and effective way. In my holistic life-coaching practice, I have found that people can become very attached to their problems. On the surface, they maintain that they want to get better, but in reality, they are much more interested in trying to convince me that their problems are not solvable. Some people even feel offended if you tell them that there is a method that can get rid of their problems in a very short time, and that they don't have to explore their suffering in depth. They react as if you want to take something very precious away from them.

  Likewise, some people believe they need to find traumas from their past that have caused their present problems in order to resolve them. If I tell these people this is unnecessary and that their problems can be resolved much faster, some of them are a bit resistant.

  Some people remain skeptical even if they experience impressive improvements with higher-consciousness healing. Unfortunately, the rational part of their minds cannot accept the gift that this method really is, and they dismiss its healing power. Others have felt sad after their success with the method. For example, Barbara (whom you met in the introduction) was almost upset after she successfully dissolved her social phobia. She asked, “Why did I have to go through all those years of therapy when it could have been so easy?” I couldn't answer this question, other than to share my feeling that higher-consciousness healing is a wonderful gift that she just hadn't received earlier.

  Summary

  Higher-consciousness healing can be used for all personal problems.

  People who are involved in your problem may change in amazing ways, but it is not your personal will that brings about these changes. They are brought about by your higher consciousness, which always acts in the highest interest of everyone concerned.

  Higher-consciousness healing is very effective in reducing physical pain and chronic tiredness.

  Higher-consciousness healing is an effective self-help tool designed for people who want to solve their problems with a minimum of time, money, and energy.

  You do not need to be religious or spiritual to use higher-consciousness healing. You can view your higher consciousness simply as a part of your mind that is more loving and wise than your everyday consciousness.

  Everyone has enough basic visualization skill to use higher-consciousness healing effectively. It is enough to think about your symbol, or simply to know that it is there.

  Higher-consciousness healing is a very straightforward method that is completely free of side effects.

  Chapter 2

  THE DISCOVERY OF HIGHER-CONSCIOUSNESS HEALING

  WHEN I DISCOVERED higher-consciousness healing, I had been suffering for many years from a subtle but deep feeling of emotional hurt and sadness that seemed completely disconnected from what was actually going on in my life. This feeling just would not go away, no matter how much my outer life improved and no matter how much I worked on my inner being with various therapeutic methods and intensive Buddhist meditation. I had tried everything: psychoanalysis, bioenergetics, past-life regression, aroma therapy, crystal therapy, emotional freedom technique, cognitive-behavioral therapy, landmark education, mantra chanting, brain-hemisphere synchronization, and Taoist energy and body work. No matter what I did, the sadness always returned.

  I felt very frustrated, but something inside told me that it was possible to solve this problem, just as I had solved many other problems in my life. I fervently wished that my suffering should not be in vain, but that I would be able to use my problem to discover the deepest principles of personal healing in order to help other people. I believe my desire to use my own suffering to help others was one of the reasons my prayer was answered. My own pain has truly been like the grit in an oyster that finally produces a beautiful precious pearl.

  During the year that followed my discovery of higher-consciousness healing, I refined the method by using all the knowledge I had gained from my many years of training in Buddhism and psychotherapy. Sometimes, I had a strange feeling—as if an unseen force were guiding me in this process. For example, my own symptoms sometimes flared up for no clear reason, and this led me to refine the method. After making these adjustments, my symptoms disappeared as quickly as they had come. Over time, higher-consciousness healing brought me a degree of harmony, peace, and happiness that I had never experienced before.

  After some of my friends and I had experienced very good results with the method, I felt no hesitation in adding it to my counseling repertoire when working with my clients. In fact, it proved so effective that two things happened. First, I dropped a
lmost all the other techniques I had learned in my Gestalt, family, and body-awareness therapy training in favor of higher-consciousness healing. Second, the length of time my clients spent with me in therapy shortened dramatically, because they often felt “sorted out” after only a few sessions.

  Using higher-consciousness healing makes people much more independent, so that they do not need the help of a professional as much—or even at all. Sue, for example, learned quickly to rely on her own inner resources for help.

  Sue

  Sue contacted me because she wanted to find a partner. She felt lonely, depressed, and very fearful that she would never find someone. We first worked on her fear, which she successfully decreased with the help of a healing symbol. Sue still felt depressed and lonely, however. Therefore, her next symbol focused on her depression and her negative self-talk—”It's just not meant to be” or “It's hopeless.” After practicing her new healing symbol for another two weeks, Sue told me that she was able to stop her negative self-talk, and that she felt altogether more positive and trusting. Simultaneously, she went on many blind dates. In the past, she had found blind dates depressing and exhausting, but now she saw them as positive learning experiences. When I last spoke to her, all her depression and fear were gone and her loneliness had been replaced with a faith that she would soon find someone.

  Chapter 3

  HOW HIGHER-CONSCIOUSNESS HEALING WORKS

  A CENTURY AGO, SIGMUND FREUD developed his now famous model of the superego, the ego, and the id. The conscious ego, Freud argued, struggles to keep the antisocial drives of the id and the strict and limiting demands of the moralizing superego at bay.

  This model and many of Freud's other theories were hailed as great advances in understanding the human psyche. Many forms of psychotherapy developed after Freud still use his basic ideas to explain how emotional disturbances come about and how they can be cured. Unfortunately, Freud's model of human nature does not give much hope for deeper happiness, because it does not recognize that there is a vast range of potentially positive qualities that lie within each of us that are not part of his model.

  The Personality Model

  Higher-consciousness healing is based on a model different from Freud's. It has three main parts:

  The conscious mind (also called the everyday, or personal, mind)

  The unconscious mind

  The higher consciousness (also called higher power)

  Our conscious mind encompasses everything of which we are aware, including our sense perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and memories. Although some of us like to think that our conscious mind is the largest part of the human mind, it is actually the smallest. Our conscious mind is like the tip of an iceberg, while our unconscious mind is like the large part of the iceberg that lies beneath the water. Our unconscious mind is many times bigger than our conscious mind, because it contains all our past experiences in minute detail, as well as everything we are experiencing at the moment, but of which we may not be aware. This may include background noises that we blank out, or feelings and thoughts we don't want to deal with at the moment. Our unconscious mind is neither negative nor positive in itself. It is more like the storehouse of all the internal and external experiences we have ever had.

  Between our conscious and unconscious mind, there is a semipermeable boundary. That means that certain things contained in our conscious mind can become a part of our unconscious, and other things that have been forgotten can become a part of our conscious mind again. If you want to experience this semipermeable boundary in your own mind, try thinking about what you ate yesterday … and the day before yesterday … and the day before that. If you are like most people, you will not remember what you ate more than two or three days ago. When you can't remember any further back, the boundary between your conscious and unconscious mind has closed. This boundary is the major problem in every kind of psychotherapy that relies on recollecting old traumas in order to heal the patient. I will say more about this problem later, but first, let's explore the role this model of the human mind plays in higher-consciousness healing.

  Our Higher Consciousness

  By far the biggest part of our mind is our higher consciousness, because it is unlimited and permeates the entire universe, including the minds of every being. In this respect, we cannot talk about our higher consciousness as something personal or individual. It is something we share with every other being in the universe. It is outside of us and something other than what we think we are, yet it is also inside of us and the core of our being. Most of us are unaware of the presence of the higher consciousness, and it is the aim of every genuine spiritual path to make us fully aware of it.

  It is difficult to imagine the vastness of our higher consciousness, because it is more than our conscious mind can understand. Also, the notion that we all participate in an all-encompassing mind can seem like an insult to our personal egos, which want to believe that we start and end where our bodies start and end, and that we are separate and highly individual beings.

  No matter how hard we try to understand higher consciousness, we cannot fully grasp it because, ultimately, it is a mystery. The idea of something mysterious and all-encompassing is a part of most religions. Christians call it the Holy Spirit; Buddhists call it Buddha-nature. In this book, I call it higher consciousness, so that people of all backgrounds can work with it. And, as I said before, we do not need to be spiritual in order to benefit from higher-consciousness healing.

  So what is our higher consciousness like?

  Imagine for a moment that you feel utterly free, uplifted, and without limitation. Nothing burdens you; no worries constrict you; joy fills your heart. You feel you have access to unlimited knowledge and infinite possibilities; you are able to do whatever you want. Now imagine that this vast space of freedom is filled with the sweetest and most tender love flowing freely from your heart to all beings without discrimination. All notions of friend and enemy are gone and you can love everyone alike. You can see that other people are suffering and deepest compassion for them springs from your heart. But you can also see the way to happiness with complete clarity and you realize that all the negative ways in which people behave come from their misguided search for happiness. You feel only one deep wish—to remove all the suffering that people are experiencing and show them the path to true happiness.

  Can you imagine all this? These feelings and this wisdom will grow stronger as we develop awareness of our higher consciousness. But our higher consciousness is more than I have just described—much more. The love, compassion, and wisdom of higher consciousness is infinite and without boundary. It truly goes beyond the limits of our imagination. Yet it is our true nature—it is what we ultimately are. So how can our higher consciousness help us solve our problems? I have to go back a little bit to explain this.

  The Unconscious Mind

  You have probably noticed that many problems—and in particular, emotional problems—cannot be solved through merely thinking and talking about them. Obviously, it is nice to let off steam and get some sympathetic support, but this alone will not solve a problem if an essential part of it is unconscious. On the contrary, a problem can seem to get even bigger the more we think and talk about it. It is like zooming in on a problem until nothing else exists in our perspective, but still without finding a solution. Therefore, in order to solve psychological problems, we must find a way to work effectively with the part in us that is causing the problem but is unconscious at the moment. One way of doing this is to enter a psychotherapy program that tries to uncover unconscious material.

  Several forms of psychotherapy work on the assumption that emotional or psychosomatic problems are caused by traumatic experiences in the past. These can be in our childhood, or even previous lives. These approaches typically believe that we have to make this traumatic material conscious again in order to release old negative feelings and correct any unhealthy decisions that we made at that time.

  Let me illustra
te this with an example. A woman who has problems creating committed relationships enters psychotherapy. Through working with her unconscious mind, she is regressed to the age of three and discovers that she was sexually abused. According to the theory, she can now release her suppressed feelings of anger and grief, and thus become happy and successful.

  Different therapies use different methods to regress clients and make the unconscious conscious. Unfortunately, bringing up unconscious material can have severe side effects. Regression doesn't acknowledge that there is a very good reason why people relegate terrible traumas from their past to the unconscious. It is one of the most merciful qualities of our mind that it can forget the bad things of our past so readily. If you are over thirty years old, you have probably noticed that your past seems better and better the older you become. This ability to forget many painful things helps us concentrate on our life at the moment and be free of the burdens of our past. People who cannot forget the traumas they have experienced suffer from posttraumatic stress that can make their present a living hell. They actually need help to forget the dreadful things they have experienced.

  When we dig into our unconscious mind to release old traumas, it can sometimes be utterly devastating. Some people who discover during psychotherapy that they were sexually abused as children report that their recollections are as distressing as if they were being sexually abused again. Instead of releasing old negative emotions, they are swamped and overwhelmed by them.

  It is very difficult to deal with recollections like these. They can be extremely painful and can make us feel like a victim. To make matters even worse, there is no way of telling whether these “memories” are true mirrors of reality. Careful investigation of what is actually happening in any form of regression therapy reveals that it uncovers only “pictures in the mind.” Nobody can say for sure what these pictures really represent. Are they true recollections? Are they fantasies? Or a mixture of both?