Unfortunately, some people have problems with all breathing exercises and they suddenly start to breathe in a strained and unnatural way. If this happens to you, please forget about the breathing part of the method. Just focus on your healing symbol and radiating its good qualities without connecting the process to your breath. If that works for you, it is better than creating new problems with the breathing part of the practice.
Antianxiety Breathing
The following breathing technique is a slight variation from what I have just explained and it can help with all problems that fall into the anxiety category—fear, panic, and nervousness. In order to calm all these emotions, we need to breathe less. When we are afraid, we breathe too fast and too much, and doing this changes our body chemistry, which strongly contributes to all forms of fear. When we can slow down our breathing, these painful feelings quickly die down. This is how it is done:
See your healing symbol in your heart and breathe out its color and good qualities with love as described before. It is most important always to breathe through your nose and never through your mouth.
Once you have breathed out, notice the gap before your next inhalation. Slowly, start to lengthen this gap by counting slowly as far as you get. Relax as much as you can while you count.
Breathe in again before you feel uncomfortable, and then immediately out again. (Never hold your in breath when you are scared, as this will strongly increase your anxiety!)
At the end of your out breath, count again as far as possible while relaxing more and more deeply. (Breathe in, breathe out, one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . etc. . . . breathe in, breathe out, count . . . and so on.)
Carry on this breathing technique until your anxiety disappears. A relaxed person can have gaps of up to fifteen seconds between exhalation and inhalation.
This antianxiety breathing technique is very powerful and has brought profound relief to every single one of my clients suffering from fear, panic, or anxiety. To do it correctly, we do not need to achieve fifteensecond gaps between our out breaths and in breaths. But we do need to make sure that we never breathe through our mouth, that we never breathe in more deeply than feels comfortable, and that we never hold our breath.
Ruby II
I asked Ruby to look at her drawing of her symbol, to let its blue color radiate throughout her body, and to relax with every out breath. After doing this for one minute, Ruby relaxed a little bit and her fear went down from 8 to 7 on the scale. Then I showed her the antianxiety breathing technique. Like most chronically fearful people, Ruby had a habit of taking fast and shallow breaths through her mouth, which made her anxiety much worse. I instructed her to breathe through her nose and to count as far as possible at the end of each out breath. At first, Ruby could only count to three, but very quickly, her breathing slowed down and she could count to eight between each exhalation and inhalation. Simultaneously, her fear went down on the scale of suffering from 7 to 5.
Loving Ourselves
The core of all happiness is a feeling of love, and at the core of love are well-meaning wishes. For the transformation in higher-consciousness healing to occur, we do not have to be dependent on someone else to love us. We can simply love ourselves. At the same time, this love for ourselves can be part of the solution to our problem. No matter why we are suffering, more love is always part of the answer. Even if our problem is physical or financial, more love will help us to relax and be more content, despite external problems and adversity.
Loving ourselves is easy to talk about, but, for many of us, it is awkward to practice. For some, it even feels wrong, as if it will make them more self-indulgent, vain, or arrogant. Fortunately, this isn't true, because loving ourselves only makes us into a more loving and happy person who genuinely has something to give to others.
There is nothing strange about loving ourselves. People who have received an abundance of love throughout their childhood love themselves as the most natural thing in the world. They are often not even aware that they are doing it, because, for them, it's second nature. Those who have not received a lot of love throughout their lives, however, find it most difficult to love themselves. But they are the ones who need this love most urgently.
It is easy to love the parts of ourselves that are already perfect. If we want to solve our problems, however, we need to love ourselves in all our weakness and imperfection. Annie learned to love the parts of herself that she had hated before.
Annie
Annie was struggling with the problem of being overweight. When I told her that she should breathe the color and the good qualities of her healing symbol into her body with love, she looked at me with barely suppressed anger and said, “I don't love my fat—I hate it!” Luckily, she was also able to laugh about her anger. I explained to her that loving herself with all her imperfections didn't mean liking her fat. It simply meant sending the color and the positive qualities of her symbol to herself as a loving gift. What counted were her good intentions for her body, and that she stop hating herself and her fat. Annie understood what I meant and she breathed the color of her symbol into her body with the positive intention that her fat cells should transform in the most healthy and happy way. And it worked! Annie lost all the weight she wanted through some moderate changes in her diet and exercise program.
• • •
I have used higher-consciousness healing with a number of clients suffering from overweight, eating disorders, and alcohol addiction. They all, without exception, simply stopped overeating and drinking once they were able to send love to themselves with the help of a healing symbol.
Developing Love for Ourselves
Love is the core of higher-consciousness healing. It is, therefore, of paramount importance to get this part of the practice right. It is much more important than breathing properly or visualizing clearly. Here is a little exercise we can use to get a loving feeling going. We can use it each time we have trouble feeling the love from our healing symbol.
Think of someone whom you find easy to like and love. This may be your child, your partner, or even a pet. See this being in front of your inner eye and wish them to be happy with all your heart. Notice the warm feeling that arises in your chest when you make this wish.
Quickly, turn your loving intentions toward yourself without thinking or changing your feeling, and wish yourself to be happy from the bottom of your heart. Love yourself with all your weaknesses and imperfections like you would love a small unhappy child.
Visualize the love for yourself as a beautiful light that surrounds you like a bubble that is as big as your outstretched arms.
Alternatively, think of your higher consciousness sending love to you. Bathe in this bubble of love until you feel warm and happy.
Say very lovingly to yourself: I wish myself to be truly happy.
Each time you lose this warm feeling, go back to the beginning of this exercise and remember how it feels to be loving by thinking of someone you find easy to love. Then, quickly, turn this feeling of love to yourself and allow it to radiate throughout and around your whole being, together with the light of your healing symbol. Alternatively, think of your higher consciousness sending you love. Do whatever evokes a more loving feeling for yourself.
I once had a client who suffered from terrible anger and envy because she felt that everyone had a better life than she had. As with all my clients, when I showed her how to send love to herself, these extremely painful feelings subsided. This happened each time we worked in this way. Unfortunately, whenever this client was by herself, she tended to practice higher-consciousness healing in a mechanical way. Sadly, she was one of the very few clients who did not benefit from working with me. Therefore, it is paramount to generate a genuine feeling of love as I have described in the previous exercise. To my joy, 99 percent of the clients with whom I have worked in the last ten years could do this after a very short time and were able to reap the full benefits of this practice.
In higher-consc
iousness healing, we imagine that joyful love emerges from our healing symbol in our spiritual heart and radiates out to our entire body. Then the loving joyful light radiates beyond our body boundaries and surrounds us like a beautiful bubble. This bubble is roughly as big as our outstretched arms. Being in the bubble of joyful love feels wonderfully warm, secure, and happy. In addition, feeling the boundaries of our bubble gives our unconscious mind a strong message that we are totally safe and enables us to relate to others in a confident and loving way. If we feel anxious or if we are entangled in difficult relationships, we should reinforce this feeling of safety by repeatedly going around the firm boundaries of our bubble of love with our inner eye.
Ruby III
By now, Ruby had reduced her fear from 8 to 7 on the scale of suffering by filling her body with the blue light of her symbol, and then from 7 to 5 by using the antianxiety breathing technique. I then reminded her that the healing light from her symbol was full of love and asked her if she could feel this love. Unfortunately, Ruby could not. I asked her to visualize her small children in front of her inner eye and to wish them to be happy with all her heart by enveloping them with bubbles of loving joyful light. That was no problem for Ruby, and she felt a very warm feeling. I then asked her to surround herself with the same loving bubble of light and to say to herself “I wish myself to be truly happy,” just as she had done with her children. Doing this was a sort of revelation for Ruby, who had suffered from self-loathing virtually all her life. To her delight, she discovered that it was perfectly within her reach to stop her self-loathing and to love herself instead. After bathing in the loving light for two minutes, her fear had reduced to 3 on the scale. I also asked her to go around the boundaries of her bubble with her inner eye and feel the sense of safety that this induced.
• • •
Sometimes, people start to feel sad when they concentrate on loving themselves. They may even end up in a state of heartbreaking self-pity. This, of course, should not happen. We must always remember that the light of our healing symbol is loving and joyful. People who have a tendency toward sadness should never forget to practice higher-consciousness healing with smiles on their faces.
Sending Love to Others
In the next step, we send the loving light of our healing symbol to everyone who is involved in our problem by surrounding them with bubbles of loving joyful light as well. Our bubbles may touch if we wish, but they should never overlap or merge.
Sending love to our adversaries is extremely liberating and will heal the effects of the most terrible traumas, as well as restore peace and harmony to our existing relationships. It is the very process of giving that makes us aware that there is an inexhaustible source of joy, love, and strength within us. Even better, through giving love, we genuinely dissolve all feelings of deprivation, helplessness, and victimization. Instead, we start to feel more confident, happy, and strong.
In my holistic life-coaching practice, I have worked with people who were abused sexually as children, who were raped or violently assaulted, and who were victims of domestic violence. I explain to all of them that it is not the actual trauma from the past that is causing their current problems, but their own current feelings of anger, resentment, or victimization. All these clients, without exception, experienced dramatic improvements in their overall well-being once they let go of these negative feelings by sending love to their assailants with the help of a healing symbol.
It is important to understand that sending love to someone who has harmed us does not mean that we forget what they did or take away their guilt. Nor does loving our adversaries mean liking the other person or simply to forgive. For example, if someone has abused a child, no one is in a position to forgive this terrible wrong; the aggressor has to live with the guilt for the rest of his or her life. Sending love to our enemies simply means to stop hating and resenting them and instead to wish them to be happy. Everyone who is happy will immediately regret all their wrongdoings and transform into a loving and really likeable person. Therefore, the most beneficial attitude we can have toward our adversaries is to send them love and good wishes. In other words, anger, resentment, and victim mentality tie us to traumatic events from our past; only love will set us free of them to embark on a life that is entirely free of the consequences of our terrible past traumas.
Sending love to others also works like a miracle in all sorts of difficult relationships. I have worked with quite a few couples on the brink of divorce, with people with strained family relations, and with clients with all sorts of other relationship problems. All of them either dramatically improved their relationships by working out their conflicts, or finally became able to withdraw from abusive individuals. It is important to understand that loving our enemies doesn't mean that we stay close to a cruel person or just put up with someone's wrongdoing without asserting our needs. It is crucial that we learn to keep a clear distance from abusive people and to continue a relationship only once we have received a credible apology and amends. The image of the firm bubbles that surround us and everyone who is involved in our problem will help us to stabilize our ego boundaries so that we can do just that.
Sending love to someone who has harmed us may seem to go against all our natural instincts. But all wise people say that “loving our enemies” is the solution to all our problems. By comparison, punching pillows and shouting angrily—as is, regrettably, done in several forms of therapy—will only aggravate our anger. You can try this out. For ten minutes, hit a pillow with all your might and shout angrily at everyone who has ever hurt you. You will find that you become physically exhausted, and you might also experience a short-lived sense of liberation. But then you will find that, on a mental level, your anger quickly returns—and often stronger than before. The only genuine, lasting, and complete solution that overcomes the effects of past traumas and problems in relationships is love.
It is important to include our parents in our loving wishes—especially if we feel resentment toward them. In my counseling practice, I have observed that it is outright impossible to become happy and successful if we still resent our parents. This is true even if our parents have behaved in an abusive or neglectful way. The reason for this is that when we hate our parents, we actually hate ourselves. I like to explain this dynamic with the image of a flowerbed. We are the flower and our parents are the flowerbed from which we grow. By resenting our flowerbed, we poison it. As a result, we can't grow into our full potential. But when we wish our parents to be happy (no matter how much wrong they have done in our upbringing), we help create a nourishing and fertile flowerbed from which we can grow into the most beautiful and lush plant.
In order to send love to our adversaries, we need to imagine them, one by one, in front of our inner eye (as far away or as near as feels comfortable). Then we imagine that the loving light from our healing symbol envelopes them within a bubble of love. In our mind, we say to this person: I wish you to be happy. If we feel regret or guilt toward them, we can say: I am sorry for what I have done and I wish you to be happy. Or I am sorry it didn't work out and I wish you to be happy. However, sending love to others doesn't just mean always speaking in a sugary voice. Quite the contrary. In my life-coaching practice, I have seen that this actually enables fearful people to stand up for their rights and speak with firm clarity. Ruby's story shows this quite clearly.
Ruby IV
After Ruby had enveloped herself in a bubble of loving joyful light, I asked her to send love to her bullying colleague and to see him within a bubble of loving joyful light as well. At first, she was very reluctant. “I want to hate and punish him,” she said with emphasis. I explained to her that it was in her own interest that her colleague be happy, because he would then stop bullying her. Finally, Ruby agreed. She sent the healing light of her symbol to her colleague and imagined that it would make him into someone happy and easy to get along with. As a result, her fear decreased even further—from 3 to 2 on the scale of suffering. Also, a lot o
f resentment she had felt along with her fear simply vanished. For the first time since working with her colleague, Ruby caught an intuitive glimpse into his psyche and realized just how unhappy he was in himself. This insight evoked some compassion in her and she felt much more confident than before. I then encouraged her to send the light of her healing symbol to her father, whom she resented for being too strict with her when she was a child.
• • •
It is important never to let our bubbles of loving joyful light merge or overlap, as this may result in unhealthy submission and dominance. There is only one exception to this rule: Our own children, before the age of puberty, can be visualized within our own bubble of light. In all other cases, the bubbles may touch if we feel very fond of the other person, or they may be very far away from each other if we want to maintain distance from our adversary. For example, we can visualize a difficult person two miles away so that he or she appears as a tiny speck on the horizon.
Sometimes, our bubbles of joyful love may seem to take on a life of their own and do things that they are not supposed to do. For example, they may distort, they may become very small, they may break, or they may start to merge. It may also appear that we or the other person do not want to stay within these bubbles. In all these cases, we should mentally interrupt this and simply return to our healthy image of two arms-lengthsized bubbles of joyful love that may touch, but do not overlap. If we have continuing problems with people “escaping” from their bubbles, we can even imagine that everyone is fastened with a seat belt within their bubbles of love. We can also visualize a glass wall between the two bubbles that will keep them separate. With time and practice, our inner image will remain more stable.
The Five-Minute Miracle Page 8
