This Thursday we launch our new tele-seminar series on how to thrive in the new economy.

Pretty much anywhere you go these days, you hear people talking about what a tough economy it is. Of course, unemployment is at alarmingly high levels, people are losing their houses, and many countries today have national debts skyrocketing out of proportion to their Gross Domestic Product. These are real problems that require real solutions.

At the same time, many people today are thriving in a way that they never thought possible. By thriving, we don’t mean simply making more money. We mean living a multidimensional life that is ultimately, deeply fulfilling: one that includes openhearted, loving relationships, a spirit of service and community, and the unwavering certainty that you have gotten in touch with the gift you were born to give, and you are giving it passionately to the world.

We’ve investigated why some people thrive beyond their wildest dreams in this “difficult economy,” and some people contract in a feeling of fear and dis-empowerment. We’ve managed to isolate 27 characteristics, which “thrivers” demonstrate.

Another way to look at these times is not so much  a “difficult economy,” but an economy of transition. When the agricultural age turned into the industrial age, or when we shifted from mechanical based industry to electronics based,  the old rules no longer applied. We are going through a shift today more dramatic than ever before. We are living through a shift  in collective consciousness, where we must evolve or perish.  People who are firmly committed to the old ways of doing things, who want to repeat what they’ve learned in school, may be in for a tough time. On the other hand, thrivers have learned how to ride the wave, and how to tune into what is coming next, instead of into what is crumbling.

Over the next 12 weeks, between now and December 8th, we are going to introduce you to the 12 most important qualities needed to thrive in the new economy. Our guests include people like Jack Canfield, Lynne Twist, Ivan Misner, Lynne Mctaggart and Hale Dwoskin. These people are not just financially successful (although most of them are), they are experiencing extraordinarily high levels of fulfillment in every area of their lives, and they know how to pass it on.

*

The series starts with a bang this Thursday, September 15th, at 6pm, Pacific time. Our guests are Hale Dwoskin, the author of “The Sedona Method,” and Luis Diaz, author of “Memory in the Cells.” We are going to be discussing how to recognize and liberate outdated beliefs about work and money.

Everything we think we know about work and money, we learned from the past. We learned it from our parents, our school teachers, we learned it from the television, we even learned it from spiritual teachers. We learn things from economists, people who are great experts in a system that is now dying. Many of us had beliefs about work and money drummed into us over many decades. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” “The early bird catches the worm.” “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

We’ve been raised to participate in an economy of scarcity, where there is probably not enough to go around. The solution is to amass more for Me. In this series, we are not going to teach you how to replace negative beliefs with positive beliefs. We’re not going to teach you how to “think and grow rich.” We’re going to go much, much deeper than that. We’re going to learn how to question deep-rooted beliefs about money, and discover how to step beyond the mind, the realm of belief, all together.

Thrivers are not people who have learned how to have only positive and abundant thoughts. They’re people who have learned how to tap into a dimension of intuition, inspiration, and insight much deeper than conceptual thinking.

This tele-seminar series is completely free. You can listen in over the web as our gift, and you can listen to the replay for 24 hours afterward.

We are sure you’re aware of the terrible tragedy happening in east Africa. More than 5,000 children under the age of 5 are dying each day due to lack of water and famine. CARE is doing extraordinary work now to alleviate suffering in Africa. They have an A++ rating for the ratio of money donated to money actually put to good use. They maintain some of the lowest administrative costs of nonprofit organizations. You can upgrade your membership in the How To Thrive Now tele-seminar series, to receive MP3 recordings, workbook pages and more. Every cent we receive after expenses will be given to CARE, to save lives.

Are you ready to thrive in your own life, and save the lives of others?

Please register today for this tele-seminar series, and please forward the news about this series to as many people as possible. We are excited, inspired, and humbled by the opportunity to have an impact on the lives of people we hardly know. That is the essence of how to thrive in the new economy: to let your participation here be more one of giving than receiving. This is the giant leap from being a consumer to a contributor.

See you on Thursday!

Arjuna Ardagh
Jonathan Robinson

>>>> REGISTER HERE!! <<<<<

The next day I got a ride to a hotel outside of Tucson, where I met David Berceli.   David was a Catholic missionary for several decades, working in war-torn areas like Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia.  His role as a missionary was not so much to convert people to Catholicism, but to help alleviate the human suffering created in the aftermath of war.  He became very familiar with the symptoms of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), and even began to suffer from it himself after spending so much time in areas where there was bombing.  He returned to the United States, got his Ph.D. in psychology, and investigated deeply the mechanisms by which trauma gets stored in the body.

He explained all this to me in a few minutes and then asked me if I would like to try his method.  “Sure,” I shrugged.  “Why not?” What happened in the next 20 minutes was nothing short of a miracle.  He asked me to put my body into different postures which put it into mild stress.  For example: raising my body up and down on one bent leg, or “sitting against the wall”.  After I went through his instructions, which were not painful, just mildly uncomfortable, a shaking began, first along the psoas muscles that run between the inner thigh and the belly.  Once the shaking became strong and involuntary, he asked me to lay down on my back, with my legs slightly open, and to breathe deeply.  The tremoring increased and moved up into my belly.  It would build up in a particular place in my body to a crescendo, and then completely dissipate.  A minute or two of nothing, and then it would build again, in another part of the body. This continued for about 15 minutes, until David suggested we had had enough for that day.

When I sat up, I felt relaxed in a way that I have probably not felt since I was a small baby.  I had let go of tension in my belly that I never knew I had.  Once I “got it” about the power of tremoring, David told me a little bit more about what he has been doing with his life.  For example, he just got back from Norway, where he was working with the education department, training them to conduct tremoring sessions with the teens who survived the shooting tragedy in July.  He worked directly with 35 survivors from the bombing in downtown Oslo.  This year, he’s already been to Japan to work with earthquake survivors, as well as regular visits to Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq.  He’s worked with the U.S. military with PTSD soldiers, as well as the civilian victims of war.  David does almost all of his work for free, in huge groups of people.  In Africa, for example, he might work with 150 people at a time, in many groups throughout the day; thereby facilitating several thousands of people per day in trauma release.

This work is powerful and effective.  Once you learn it (which you can do from a DVD), you can duplicate the effects any time you like.  It releases core stress from the body, reaching places that even the most skilled massage therapist would have trouble in helping you let go.

I find this approach particularly interesting because I am primarily a teacher of awakening.  It’s relatively easy these days to have a glimpse of limitless consciousness; the challenge is how to live it in day-to-day life.  And why are we challenged?  Simple.  You know the answer as well as I do.  Because of stress.  Because we are overwhelmed with decisions and responsibilities, and we lose connection with ourselves.  This method is one of the simplest and most powerful ways that I’ve found in a long time to relieve stress and come back to a state of innocence in your body.

It’s rare these days to find someone as devoid of self-interest as David Bercelli.  He lives in a small apartment in Tucson, and travels the world.  He’s on the road almost 300 days out of the year, and does almost all of his work for free.  The only thing he gets paid for is to train other people to be facilitators of his work, and the course is relatively inexpensive.

I want you to join me for a free tele-seminar with David Bercelli this Thursday, September 8th, at 6 pm.  I am going to talk to him about the extraordinary work he’s been doing around the world, as well as how easy it is to learn this method for yourself.  You will be able to pick up his book and DVD in the security of knowing that the money you spend will help him to support people much more traumatized, and much less fortunate, than you and me.

Please make sure you join me to meet this extraordinary and life-changing man.

REGISTER FOR THE TELE-SEMINAR WITH DAVID BERCELI HERE

Translucent people also appear to glow from the inside. They have access to their deepest nature as peaceful, limitless, free, unchanging, and at the same time they remain fully involved in the events of their personal lives. Thoughts, fears, and desires still come and go; life is still characterized by temporary trials, misfortunes, and stress. But the personal story is no longer opaque: it is now capable of reflecting something deeper, more luminous and abiding, that can shine through it.

Contemporary translucents defy many of the spiritual concepts we have inherited from religious traditions. The thousands of people I have spoken to in researching this book are not recluses. They play vigorously in their relationships with others, their work, their creativity, and their political and environmental causes, but they play to play more than to win. Translucents display an above-average generosity of spirit. Giving to other people and to the environment replaces Iago’s habits, based in lack, desire, and need. Above all, translucents have a humorous and often irreverent relationship to their personal life, beliefs, and identity.
Translucents do not fit established pigeonholes. They generally don’t follow one particular teacher, teaching, or group, although many have in their past. They are not “spiritual” in any way that can be obviously recognized through lifestyle choices. As a group they display as wide a variety of occupations, appearances, and educational and cultural backgrounds as humanity itself. They generally don’t identify themselves as “enlightened” or as having attained anything, and they are also not trying to become enlightened. They are not overly materialistic or spiritually cynical. Translucents are not uniformly vegetarians, political liberals, religious zealots, new age hippies, or self-improvement junkies. And they don’t all wear Birkenstocks.

The word translucent refers to the degree of embodiment of a realization, not to what has been realized. Hence it is a relative term, like interesting, inspiring, boring, or idiotic. These words are relative because not everyone agrees on their meaning. You might find opera inspiring, whereas someone else might be put to sleep by it. Relative terms also have no finite end. You can be “quite boring,” “rather boring,” “really boring,” even “extremely boring,” but however boring you may be, you can always outdo yourself the next day. There is no such thing as “ultimately boring.” Relative terms shift, from day to day or hour to hour. You might be really boring on Monday but more interesting on Tuesday.

Absolute words, to the contrary, are black and white, like an on-off switch. French, married, and dead are examples. “He’s quite French” sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? So does “I am married on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but single the other days.” And what about, “The doctor says she’s dead, but Frank doesn’t agree. I feel I need to get to know her better before making a judgment.” Enlightenment has generally been used as an absolute word. Even though people don’t agree on what it means or to whom it applies, those who talk about enlightenment claim it is a defined condition, and one is either enlightened or not. (Usually a man is telling you he is and you are not, so you’d better do what he tells you.)

Translucence is subtler; it is relative. One can always become more translucent, one may waver in the degree of translucence, and the people I feel to be most translucent may differ from your top ten.

When we are willing to exchange our life of preoccupation with “me” and “my needs” for a life given in the service of love itself, of that presence itself, we are faced with an interesting paradox.

On one side of the paradox, we recognize that everything is perfect just as it is. When the chatter of the mind recedes just a little bit, when the smells, colors, and textures of the world become more immediately felt, we recognize the grace running through it all. Even in conflict, or in the midst of what we call suffering, if we are really in touch with the pulse of life itself, we can feel the beauty of it all.

On the other side of the paradox, we realize that everything is continuously evolving. Our human condition, as it is now, is flawed with unconscious habits, addictions, and compulsions. In seeing the gap between who we are today and who we could be, seeing the trickle of gifting that’s coming through us relative to the latent torrent that we intuit, we bow in humility. When we look down from our resting point on the mountain, we may marvel at how far we have come from the valley below, but when we look up, the peaks are still lofty and daunting, and we know there is still much more to discover.

Between these two poles of paradox, that everything is perfect as it is on one side and everything is evolving and imperfect on the other side, lies the art of translucent spiritual practice—the art of practice with no goal. I borrowed the word “translucent,” usually used to describe the physical universe, in my 2005 book The Translucent Revolution. Translucence describes a medium that is neither opaque nor transparent. A wall, for example, is completely opaque—light cannot pass through it. A sheet of glass, if it’s really clean, is transparent—you could walk right up to it and bang your nose, because you might not even see that it’s there. A translucent medium, on the other hand, is neither opaque nor transparent: a sheet of frosted glass, a colored crystal, or a sculpture made of colored glass. Translucent objects maintain their form, color, and texture, yet they allow light to pass through them. When you shine light on a translucent object, it appears to glow from within. Translucent people are neither opaque nor transparent. They are no longer glued to their own separate agenda and allegiance to beliefs held in the mind, and in that sense they are not opaque. But they also have the honesty and humility to recognize that the habits of the personality remain, and could never perfectly reflect presence. They are lit up by their deepest nature, yet they remain fully engaged in their daily personal lives. Translucent people also appear to glow as if from within themselves.

Any kind of translucent practice will allow you to be lit up by a radical awakening to who you really are, to be lit up by an awakening to the silence underneath the noise, the spaciousness underneath the movement. But you will also retain the humility, the sanity, and the honesty to face your human condition, just as it is, and to allow this human monkey to be nothing more than that, a monkey without much hair.

Translucent spiritual practice walks along the razor’s edge. We practice not to attain a future goal but in respect for the sacredness of this very moment. We practice so that whatever has been realized, whatever is the deepest recognition of the heart, can be given as an offering, an expression of gratitude for the beauty of this moment. When we are no longer obsessed with trying to attain something in the future, we are practicing for now, for this moment. All that is left is to make this moment now a more beautiful moment, a work of art rather than a striving for something more.

As we walk this razor’s edge, there is always the danger of falling to one side or to the other. If we fall to one side, we fall into self-congratulation, the delusion that our human condition is somehow perfected or enlightened. Then we become unwilling to face our humanity and be honest about what we find. We want to grab on to the perch of lofty spiritual states with both our taloned feet, and can’t wait to tell our friends just how impressed we are with ourselves. I’m sure you’ve met people who’ve become obsessed with their own attainment. Maybe at some point you have even met someone like that when you’ve looked in the mirror; I know that I have. When we fall to that side of the edge, evolution stops, because we are no longer willing to look, be honest, and feel. We cling to the thought: I am enlightened. I have made it. I have got it. I’ve had the insight, haven’t you? Not only does evolution stop, but so do most of our friendships.

On the other hand, we can also fall to the other side of the razor’s edge, into the endless treadmill of self-improvement. There, we become fixated on all of the things that are still wrong with us, all of the things that need to be fixed. Then, we start to worry. “Maybe the reason that I’m not more open and loving and accepting is because of that thing that happened with my mother when I was four. I’d better go back to my therapist and work on that some more. And maybe that’s not enough? Maybe I also need to involve the body and perhaps release tension from the solar plexus.” We start to worry that perhaps the way we are eating or exercising is not correct. We try to manifest all kinds of things and qualities to make life conform to our ideas of how it should be. Our attempts to make this poor human monkey into an improved human monkey become endless. In our obsession with self-improvement, we are so busy focusing on what could be that we overlook the perfection of now. We become so busy with how we could be better that we no longer smell the scent of the evening jasmine. We no longer feel the mystery behind the eyes of our beloved. We no longer taste the food we eat. Everything becomes about tomorrow: “When I’ve finally fixed myself, then I can live.”

Of course, we will inevitably fall from the razor’s edge again and again. From time to time, all of us slip into marveling at our attainment or into convincing ourselves that we must fix everything before we can really enjoy life. But there’s a beauty once we see this process, once we recognize the paradox itself. A translucent life is self-regulating. When we stray too far into self-congratulation, something begins to dry up, like a plant that’s no longer receiving water. We can talk about the presence, but it is no longer living us, as a shimmering mystery. Life becomes repetitive, a reenactment of the same state over and over again. As soon as we start cherishing ourselves, the very richness of the realization that brought us to do so disappears.

Similarly, if we stray too far into self-improvement and get too busy, something deep within us calls out for that perfume of the divine, the knowing that everything is blessed in this moment. Something within us intuitively knows that there is no need to work for what is already here, and demands that we snap our fingers and be free. And so it is that we stray and return and stray and return to the middle way, where everything is perfect and imperfect in the same breath.

To read more, purchase my book Leap Before You Look here.

Photo credits: Idea go, winnond, Simon Howden

We discovered some unconscious beliefs I was holding about different things in my life, and instead of talking about the content, or the story or the history or anything, he had me do something very strange. He had me tap on different points of my body while doing other unusual activities like counting from 20 backwards in multiples of three, or singing Yankee Doodle.

The amazing and unexpected consequence was that a lot of aspects of my life got clear on their own without having to deal with them directly.

Twenty years later, I got re-introduced to this method of “tapping” by my friend Nick Ortner.

Tapping is a simple system for tuning into energetic or mental blocks, and then activating energy points in your body to neutralize the blocks. Nick discovered tapping a few years ago when he was suffering from some health issues. He was so blow away by the results that he went out and bought a video camera, some lights, and some microphones. He had no previous experience with film making.

Together with a couple of buddies, they unpacked the equipment, plugged things in without quite knowing what they were doing, and made a documentary film about tapping.

They gathered together twelve people for a weekend who had really serious challenges: phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc.  By the end of the weekend, miraculous shifts had occurred. They brought these same people back together again a few months later. Eight of the twelve had sustained extraordinary results in their life without any psychotherapy or emotional work, or even thinking about things much. The only thing they did was tap.

Nick Ortner is going to be my guest on a free tele-seminar this Thursday, August 11th at 6pm Pacific time. We’re going to talk about the history of tapping, the extraordinary results it produces, and he’ll  tell you how you can jump onto the tapping wave and use it in your own life.

This is something that has helped me and Chameli personally a great deal. We’ve found that it’s an amazing adjunct to meditation. I highly recommend that you be on this call.

Photo from the free ftp manual.

With the willingness to be less defined comes a loosening of our grip on the past. The past is of little use when you have no case to defend. If the trial is dismissed as boring and irrelevant, you can send the witnesses home to get on with their lives and dump the bulging dossier of carefully crafted case notes into the trash. Translucents have a natural interest in forgiving and moving on. Forgiveness is no longer a moral virtue, or something we need to practice, but the effortless by-product of no longer needing to protect anidentity with a story attached to it. The past is not healed; it simply ceases to be useful.

I know a woman named Sarah who had memories of abuse as a child. She was never quite sure which of the events she remembered actually happened, but they certainly all seemed real. She saw a number of therapists over many years. She visited her family from time to time; she tried to sit down with her father to find out what had really happened. She joined a support group. This identity, as a survivor of abuse, was one of the first things she would tell you about herself. Some years ago, Sarah came to a gathering I offered. She had an awakening; she discovered reality without the filters of her mind.

Recently, I tentatively asked her again about her memories. I knew it was a sensitive subject. “I don’t really know if that stuff happened or not,” she laughed. “Maybe it did. I don’t think about it anymore. It’s not interesting. It doesn’t feel like I healed the past.” She stopped and looked surprised. “It’s more like I don’t really have a past. I’d need to think a lot to create one.” Sarah has been to visit her father on several occasions since her shift but feels no need to talk about the past. They discuss sports results and gardening and have a good time. Sarah discovered forgiveness as a by-product of releasing a part of her identity. It was the death of a part of herself and, apparently, a great relief.

A survivor of abuse has every reason in the world to be angry, to have strong feelings. A translucent’s forgiveness is neither a moral quality nor a cultivated virtue, but the natural and inevitable consequence of knowing oneself as something more than the past. When we disidentify with the story, there’s no need to hold onto it with regret. We forgive as an act of allegiance to the present moment; it becomes choiceless.

Instead of clinging to our familiar identity, as we grow in translucence, we discover a thirst for death and rebirth while still alive. Many of us have experienced several different lives all in one lifetime. Translucents welcome this death of identity with a sense of play and adventure. David Deida describes the process like this: “Once I feel complete with something, it’s over for me as a gift, and it drops, letting a new gift evolve. If I meet someone who could do what I can do better, I stand aside and let them do it, and develop a service that is missing in the world.”

At one time Deida was considered one of the world’s top neuroscientists. He worked at Ecole Polytechnique and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. When that career was complete, he knew it. Neuroscience held no more interest or attraction. He then co-invented a new form of calculus, publishing articles about it in mathematics journals. Then, when he knew that life was over, he moved to Hawaii and taught Hatha yoga for many years. In the mid-1990s he started to write about sex, relationship, and spirit, since he didn’t see anyone else doing that in the way he wanted to see it done. “I’ll be moving on from the whole sex/relationship/spirit thing,” he says, “as soon as someone gets up to speed. The sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

Translucents enjoy creating and letting go of identities.

To read more, purchase my book The Translucent Revolution HERE.

Photos credits: Jomphong, africa

Notice how you are already breathing in this moment.
Is the breath coming more into the upper part of the body?
Is it reaching the diaphragm?
Or is the breath reaching all the way down to the lower belly?
After just watching the way you are breathing for a couple of minutes,
Begin to bring some intention to your breathing.
With the in-breath,
Let the lower belly soften and expand.
When the lower belly feels full,
Feel the diaphragm expand with the breath.
Finally, let the chest and lungs fill completely with breath.
Hold the in-breath for a few moments,
Only as long as is comfortable,
Then let the air be expelled fully from the lungs:
First from the chest, then the diaphragm, and then the lower belly.
Just when you think you’re done,
Give an extra little push,
And you will find there is even more air to be expelled.
Hold on the out-breath for a few moments, before you inhale again.
Continue to breathe totally in this way for several minutes.

Awareness of the breath and breathing consciously is the basis of all yoga practices. It reduces stress and anxiety, brings fresh oxygen to the blood, and restores us to fully feeling what we are experiencing and to being in the present moment. It is so simple, and it can be done anywhere at any time.

The natural wisdom of the body allows it to breathe totally. At night, whenever you are in dreamless sleep, you naturally start to breathe from the belly. You wake up from a good night’s sleep feeling refreshed, new-born. The problems of the night before seem far-off; you have new energy and a new outlook. All this is because you were breathing into the belly for many hours, and the whole system has become rejuvenated as a result.

Our breathing closes down because of our nonstop thinking and our unwillingness to feel. Most of us breathe only halfway, into the chest but not all the way down into the lower belly. We feel less emotional pain that way, but we also feel less alive. We move more into the mental world. It is a vicious cycle: our closing down emotionally leads to restricted breathing, which in turn leads to further shutting down, thought, and emotional disconnect.

When you breathe totally in the way described here, you will feel more, and the feelings will also pass more quickly. Your thoughts will become more transparent—they will seem less real to you, less concrete. You will be fooled less often by the mind. This is a great practice to do when you feel nervous; actors and performers practice in this way to calm themselves and to remain focused. Use this practice frequently, and it will start to become a new way of living.

To get 71 more simple practices like these, purchase my book Leap Before You Look here.

But my greatest teacher in the last months has been Shuba  ( his nickname) my fifteen year old son, whose wisdom far outshines anything I’ve been able to give him. He’s just finished his first year at high school.

Everything seemed to be going fairly well for the first few months. Whenever I asked, he reassured me he was up on homework, so I gave him a fairly loose rein. Until I discovered that he was getting close to failing a couple of classes, and had started consuming things that I’d say he’s not ready for. He started to bring friends home who struck me as prime examples of “not the right influence.” He had an accident, caused more by foolishness than bad luck,  and ended up in the hospital with a broken bone.  I know I know.  I should’aa, could’a, ought to’a…  I know. When all of this came to light, the Field Marshall arose from out of my psyche. “You’re grounded,” I announced. “You go to school, you come home, you do your homework, and that’s it. No more parties. No more hanging out in town. No more going over to friend’s houses.  Not for quite a while.” With the litany of chaos he knew he’d created, he wasn’t  in the mood to argue. “OK,” he said limply, and went back to his room.

After a few weeks, his hand was healing up, his grades were not great, but certainly improving, and his attitude was, well, pretty good. His was emptying the dishwasher, cooking dinner, and seeking out ways to be helpful.

“Dad,” he said one day. “Can I go to a friend’s house now and stay the night?” I asked who it was, and sure enough, they were on my “not a good influence” list.

“No,” I said.  Ok, lets be honest here.  “NO!” I bellowed. “You need to get your life fully back on track before you can go anywhere.”

He looked at me, not with anger or resentment, but with a clarity that I couldn’t really deny. “I’ve really been working hard on starting new,” he said. “I’ve been doing my homework, staying focused.  But you have to see me with fresh eyes, Dad. If you’re always going to see me through the filter of what I did wrong in the past, you’ll never give me a chance to start over.”

He had a point. I knew he was right. And darn it, he knew that I knew he was right. “Ok,” I said. “We’ll give it a try.”

He messed up one more time after that, in a small way, but he came clean about it right away. “It takes time to change all your habits,” he said. “You have to be patient.”

Again I knew he was right. And he knew that I knew he was right.

Then came the big test. A close friend of his was having a birthday party. The parents had gone out of town and left her the house. Go figure.  “EVERYBODY is going,” he told me. I guessed that all kinds of illegal temptations would be available. “I want you to trust me, Dad. I want you to give me a chance and trust me to make good chooses.”

The Field Marshal was in a firm NO. I knew it was a gamble, and perhaps a foolish one, but finally I said “ok”. He wanted to spend the night, but I told him that was just going too far.

We picked up a bunch of his friends (yes, all in the “not a good influence” category) and I dropped them off at the party around eight.

When I picked them up at midnight, the entire neighborhood was throbbing with music. This was an area with houese far apart from each other, each on a large lot.  There must have been a hundred and fifty kids spilling out of every door and window. The entire area smelled of illegality. My son and his friends were waiting at the top of the driveway for me. As they piled in, I could the bloodshot eyes in the rear mirror, and I could hear  slurred speech. Except for Shuba, who sat up front with me. He looked across and grinned. His eyes and his speech were clear. “Ok Dad?” he said. The unspoken subscript was loud and clear. “You see? You can trust me.”

After we dropped his friends off, I asked him, “So, did you drink anything?”

“Nope!” he said in a “I told you so” sort of way.

“Did you smoke any weed?”

“Nope!” he said again.

Since that day, Shuba hastaken consistent pride in proving me wrong. the rest of the year he delivered his homework, he looked for a job, and now he chose to take two weeks of summer school to retake one of the classes he failed.

I’ve been studying Chi Kung since I was in my twenties.  It’s a Chinese system for circulating energy through the body, done through a series of standing exercises. One of the things I learned is how you can work with a partner to make them strong or weak. Ask your partner to roll their tongue back to the roof of their mouth, for example, and they become stronger using a simple muscle test. Shift the posture so it’s aligned with gravity, and strength increases. But I also learned that you can cause another person to become strong or weak simply by the way you look at them. If you just think your partner as weak, and test their muscle strength, they become weak. Think of your partner as strong, trustworthy, and reliable, and their muscle strength increases.

So this the story of how my fifteen year old son  became my teacher. If you want your teenager to do well at school, keep off drugs, and develop good habits, I’ve learned  a few things.  If you get heavy and inflict punishment, and you may well create resistance and lying.  If you can see your kid as trustworthy, even when the evidence is to the contrary, your teen may well prove you right.

When you start to feel needy or insecure,
Celebrate it completely.
Ask your partner to sit in a chair or on the sofa, A
nd sit at your partner’s feet for a few minutes.
Enter into your fear of abandonment,
The need to be loved completely.
Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me. I beg you.
I need you so much.
I can’t live without you. Please stay with me.
Look at me. Look at me. I want you. I need you.
Please don’t leave me.
As you enter more fully into this practice,
It will overflow from this exploration into deeper feeling.
You may find yourself crying.
It may evoke long-forgotten memories in you,
Or even the call of the heart to the divine.
If you are the one sitting in the chair or on the sofa
Do not react in any way.
Above all do not try to reassure or comfort your partner.
But equally do not reject him or her.
Just look and experience your partner without reaction.
Do this practice for about five minutes,
Then stand up, shake, and let it go.
If you choose to, you can reverse roles
Many couples find it helpful to do this practice every day for a month
And then stop.

Any feeling you resist will eventually become ugly and something you feel ashamed of. If you repress sex, it becomes perversion. If you repress anger, it becomes bitterness and tension. If you repress neediness, it becomes aloofness and distance. The dilemma we all get caught in is whether to repress our feelings to try to keep a good façade, or to act them out and risk alienating other people by being “too much.” This is true more than ever with the feeling of neediness. If we show signs of being dependent and clingy, we are afraid that we will become ugly and repulsive to our partner, especially if the relationship is new.

The way to transcend this dilemma is through transforming neurosis into art. You can turn any feeling you might otherwise be ashamed of into an art form when you introduce an element of awareness and conscious choice and, even more important, a sense of humor. Whatever is celebrated in this way, neediness, jealousy, control, or criticism, becomes a form of entertainment.

Why do people enjoy the films of Woody Allen so much, or Rowan Atkinson? The same personality traits they exhibit could be painful to watch if they were hidden and repressed, but by being celebrated and slightly exaggerated, they are transformed into an art form. When neediness is celebrated in this way, you will actually come to enjoy it. It is a relief to let it pour out; in your totality you will feel passion, tremendous aliveness. And your partner will enjoy it also: neediness can be sexy, funny, and energizing when it is celebrated as a work of art.

For 71 more simple practices like these, purchase my book Leap Before You Look here.

Photo credits: luigi diamanti, photostock

During the time that we passed through this visit to the valley of the shadow of death, we worked with two very powerful healers, and I’m going to introduce you to both of them over the next weeks. One is a man called Chunyi Lin, the author of the book You Were Born a Healer. He’s a third-generation qigong master that now lives in Minnesota. We know Chunyi from our membership in the Transformational Leadership Council. We worked with another healer at the same time, Deirdre Hade, and we will be introducing her to you in a couple of weeks.

As soon as the young doctor told Chameli he thought she had cancer, we called Chunyi right away. From his office in Minnesota, over the telephone, he was able to “tune in” to Chameli’s body. He didn’t ask for the results of any of the medical tests, or even for her symptoms. He just closed his eyes and connected.

Healers like Chunyi don’t talk in terms of “cancer” and “not cancer.” They read energy. He could sense some of what he calls “darker” energy around where the tumor was located. So, over several days, he worked on cleaning it up.

Chunyi would call Chameli on the phone every day, ask her to drink a glass of water, and then work on clearing the stuck energy. Each day, she felt better and better. After a week we went back to see a specialist. He did more tests, and this time decided  that it was really impossible to say if it was cancer or not.

By the time we went in for the surgery, Chunyi and Deirdre had been working on Chameli for almost two weeks. Chunyi told us that all the blocked energy had been cleared.  The operation went  smoothly, and Chameli’s recovery time was miraculously short.

So how does all this work, do you think? There are hundreds of people with these kinds of gifts all over the world, creating medical miracles every day. Of course, the conventional medical establishment has no explanation.

I have also been dealing with a chronic health condition for the last several years. Having spent way too much time in India, I had contracted all kinds of bugs, and my digestive system never really recovered. I’ve been in for endless tests to find out what it could be. They did an colonoscopy (in layman’s terms, that’s a camera up your bum), an endoscopy (same camera down your throat, hopefully they washed it off in the meantime), and endless blood tests.  None of these tests could finally conclude what was wrong with me.

After Chunyi’s incredible success with Chameli, I asked him to tune into my body as well. In the very first session, he was able to tell me that I was dealing with inflammation of the pancreas. Not one other doctor had been able to come up with that conclusion. When I looked up the symptoms of pancreatitis, it fit perfectly. Now Chunyi has been working on clearing the energy in my pancreas, and low and behold, I’m feeling tremendously better. I’m not totally healed yet, but definitely 50% of the way there.

Quite honestly, I have no idea whatsoever how this kind of healing works. It defies all of our logical understanding about the nature of reality. But if you’re interested, we’re going to find out.

This Thursday, July 21st at 6pm PST, I’m going to be live on the phone with Chunyi Lin, a third-generation qigong master and healer from China, and we’ll quiz him about what he does to create these kinds of extraordinary results. Not only that, he’s also going to teach us how we can become healers as well.

I hope you join me for what I know will be an amazing meeting.

Register for the free tele-seminar here.

Photo credits: Danilo Rizzuti, Salvatore Vuono