I Heart Me (25 page)

The mind works in symbolic ways. If you perceive there to be a gap between where you are now and where others are, doing things you'd love to do or being things you'd love to be, imagine building a bridge across it. Make it a nice bridge.

Perhaps you're met on the bridge by people, or even angels, who help you cross. Make it a nice sunny day. Do it as a meditation. Put on some nice music and create a nice setting around yourself.

The symbolic bridging of the gap, and having help to cross, will help you feel better in yourself and more confident that you can get to where you want to go.

Often there are many things that we could do to improve our life, but we don't do them because it never occurs to us that we can. If our root assumption is that we're
not
enough, we'll assume that other people have skills, confidence and self-belief, and we don't. We may put others' success down to money or position. We won't have those either. But great things are often achieved by people who started with nothing – and holding back is almost always down to a feeling of
not
enough.

If you're holding back because of a perceived gap between yourself and others, another way to remove the gap is to start to think of things others do and figure out how you could do them better. It helps reduce the fear of taking action and also helps you realize that you
can
realize your dreams.

SELF-LOVE GYM:
Doing It Better

• What are others doing that you could be doing too?
  
• How could you do it better than the other people? What improvements can you identify?
  
• Choose three things and take at least one action step towards each one in the next 48 hours. For example, if others are running online courses and you would like to be doing that too, you could sign up for one of the courses to see how it is done. Or you could talk to someone about getting started.
  

As we learned earlier, being authentic creates connections. It's important, then, in stepping up and out into the world, that we interact with people as often as we can in an authentic way. It will help our confidence and also our self-worth.

When we lack self-worth we usually lose confidence and actually shrink away from people. We may make excuses not to interact with them. We may put them down and attempt to elevate ourselves above them. Of course we're only fixating on their deficiencies as a way of plugging our own self-worth deficit.

When we feel good about ourselves, connection is normal. In a state of
enough
there are no blocks to connection.

Turning that around, if we go out and connect, we will start to feel
enough
. So, make a point of interacting with people – shop assistants, waiters, policemen, even the people who issue parking tickets. If you're not used to it, now's the time to get used to it – and good at it. Push yourself out of your comfort zone. It will help you! Even if it feels strange, embarrassing almost, just push through it.

Take an interest in people. And take every opportunity to be kind. Kindness opens hearts. It facilitates vulnerability. It dissolves shame. It shows you for who you really are. It shows that you
are
enough.

And do you know why this is? It's because you
are
.

In stepping up and out into the world, we find that fear goes away and we can live in happiness and joy. Except … that isn't quite the way it works. Fear
doesn't
disappear, especially if we continue to challenge and stretch ourselves.

Part of the difficulty a lot of people have with stepping up and out is that they want the fear to go away. Part of the attraction of books about enlightenment, and I know this from personal experience, is the hope that through becoming enlightened we can banish fear. But what if we could change our relationship with it? What if we could just accept it instead? That would mean we'd be more at peace with it, we'd get more used to it and it would lose its grip on us.

We need to make this shift, because in my experience fear never goes away as long as we're consciously stepping up and out. If we can live with that, and expect it, the magic is that fear becomes a friend, something to be expected, welcomed even, because it tells us that what we're about to do matters to us.

So, embrace fear. Step up and out and leave your comfort zone behind. That's a very important part of self-love.
It's not self-love that gets you out there
.
Getting out there brings you self-love
. Self-love often lies just at the edge of your comfort zone.

And when you step up and out, reflect on the fact that you had the courage and confidence to do it. Don't focus on the problems you overcame. Focus on how you got through those problems.
Focus on what that says about who you are. This is what I call ‘putting in the “I am”'.

Confidence comes from ‘
I have done
', but self-love comes from ‘
I am
.' So, when you're building up self-love, put in the ‘I am'. For example:

• ‘I faced a fear' means ‘I
  am
  courageous.'
  
• ‘I stood up to this person' means ‘I
  am
  learning to stand up for myself.'
  
• ‘I spoke publicly' means ‘I
  am
  becoming more confident.'
  

Bringing your acts of courage and confidence back to yourself in this way will remind you that you are courageous and confident. It will help you face other difficulties and challenges with a sense of meaning, seeing them as opportunities to grow and to develop self-love.

Chapter 14

The Fourth Stage of Self-Love

‘I have given up the little self for the Holy Self and I have found the Way.'

J
OHN
R
ANDOLPH
P
RICE

I was in a room with two men. I seemed to be in some kind of military service. We knew that an explosion was imminent and we were about to die. I seemed to believe that I would still exist afterwards.

Seconds later, the explosion came. I felt warmth. No pain! Just warmth on my skin. Then I was in a bright white place that was filled with soft, warm white light. I'm not sure how long I was there before I noticed that I had no form. I was also aware that I was on the ‘other side' and was a little pleased that even though my body was gone, I was still alive.

Then I heard a female voice whispering to me. Over and over again, she whispered, ‘Your thoughts create! Your thoughts create! Your thoughts create!' Then it became ‘Your thoughts create your world! Your thoughts create your world!'

I remember that whisper so clearly. I can hear it now as I write these words.

Then I woke up.

I learned later in the day that my dad's Aunt Lizzie had died that morning. Might my dream somehow have been a communication from her? I thought so. It was one of those dreams that feels so real that when you wake up it takes a few seconds to accept that it was just a dream.

I asked my good friend Kyle Gray about it. He's a highly accurate medium and the bestselling author of
Angel Prayers
.

Kyle asked his angels about my experience. He then told me that because of my sensitive perception, my soul knew Lizzie was passing and it reminded me that, no matter which way we go, we always return to an ever-present love and peace. Lizzie was acknowledging what I'd known all along, so that I'd have a more personal experience of heaven. He said my mind had basically created a scene of going to heaven so I could see that it was all love.

‘Wow!' was my response. I trust Kyle and have been on the receiving end of his astonishing otherworldly communication skills on more than one occasion. I believe in what he said. It feels right to me.

Some might think that a scientist has no place talking about life on the other side. I would disagree strongly. I don't subscribe to the idea that consciousness is inside the head, or produced by brain chemistry. Such a notion doesn't account for the wealth of
research that shows correlations between the neural states of people separated by a distance. I believe that consciousness is fundamental to reality and that, in a sense, everything is animated by it.

My belief is that just as different shapes, forms, textures and colours of life exist, so different shapes, forms, textures and colours of consciousness exist too, some of which we might interpret or know as angels, guides or deceased loved ones. In some ways, the brain acts like an aerial that tunes to a frequency that extracts from reality what we know as ourselves and others.

Could the consciousness of my dad's aunt have visited me for real? I believe so. I believe that when her brain ceased to function, her consciousness was no longer identified with her physical body. She was then able to be anywhere and she was able to communicate with me.

This leads me into considering a fourth stage of self-love.

Might there be a kind of fourth stage in the self-love progression from
not
enough to
enough
? OK, ‘might there be kind of' isn't the most scientific way I've ever posed a question, but that's because the fourth stage might be construed as spiritual or religious and some might not agree that it even exists.

While many of you will believe in God, spirit, universal consciousness or whatever you choose to call it, many won't. But regardless of spiritual or religious leanings, every one of us needs love to grow. That's a fact of biology and it's also a fact
of psychology. And every single person on this planet deserves to know that they are worthwhile, that their very life is relevant. That's also a fact!

So, in the spirit of being authentic, I'd like to present some of my personal views on the nature of existence and why, fundamentally, we all matter.

It might surprise you to know that the atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999 per cent empty space. That's 13 nines after the decimal point, if you haven't counted. That's like you standing in an empty room that's the size of an average city. It's funny how you're solid, isn't it?

Your atoms are made of subatomic particles: protons, neutrons, electrons, croutons, morons and quarks. (OK, there might be a couple of made-up particles there. I'll leave it to you to guess which.) Particles themselves aren't really made of anything. If you were to prod one, it would feel like the air around a magnet feels when you try to push two of the same poles together – more energy than substance.

Particles emerge out of what's known as the quantum field. It's a field of energy. That's it. There's nothing solid in the quantum field. It's just energy. If you distil down the basic belief in science, we're really all just a bunch of atoms – round about 10 to the power 28, give or take a few. How is it that we can even think?

The conventional assumption is that it's all controlled by brain chemistry. Makes sense! But what if our consciousness or, let's say, our being or essence, is more than the sum of its parts? What if consciousness isn't even inside our head? What if it just feels that way because we have a head? If we didn't have a body, would we still exist?

People who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) would say so. Anita Moorjani experienced being out of her body and watching a resuscitation attempt on it. Her awareness was detached from her body, similar to how mine was in my dream. Her body wasn't at all necessary for her to be conscious.

During her experience she felt her awareness stretch, rather like stretching a rubber band, until she became the entire universe as a state of consciousness. She understood the meaning behind the words ‘I am', which many spiritual and religious texts refer to as the name of God.

Anita knew that it was not ‘I am
this
' or ‘I am
that
' – ‘I am a human,' for instance. Anything after ‘I am' was smaller than the infinity that she knew herself to be at that moment.

Huge numbers of people have had NDEs. Most just don't speak of them, especially to doctors, in case the doctors believe they have neurological trauma and need to be hospitalized for longer. Would you risk that?

When a doctor is sympathetic, however, and patients feel they can speak freely, the numbers indicate that the experience is surprisingly common. A study by Dutch cardiologist Pim van
Lommel of 344 cardiac patients who had flatlined and been resuscitated found that 62 of them – 18 per cent – had experienced an NDE.
¹
Other studies have highlighted a similar statistic.
²