CASE STUDIES: LIVING EXAMPLES OF TRUTH
Over the years, I’ve found that stories serve a great purpose: to reinforce information in a practical manner. Hearing about someone else’s experience makes it more real for us. Once we can relate to the challenges and triumphs a person has along their journey from one state of consciousness to another, we start to believe a similar experience can happen for us. Stories also make the ideas from the teachings become less philosophical and more personal.
The case studies that you are about to read concern real people who have applied the information you just learned in the previous chapters. They first understood the concepts as intellectual knowledge in their minds, then they applied it and experienced it in their bodies, and finally they turned it into wisdom in their souls. For these students to accomplish such supernatural changes, they ultimately had to master some aspect or limitation in themselves—and if they could do it, so can you.
Ginny Heals Her Chronic Back and Leg Pain
On December 9, 2013, Ginny was driving on the highway in Las Vegas when her car was hit from behind. Even though she slammed on the brakes, the impact catapulted her car into the car in front of her, resulting in a double impact. She immediately felt a burning sensation in her lower back as pain shot down her right leg. When the paramedics arrived, she described her pain as moderate, but over the next few days, the pain increased until it was constant and severe. Most of her pain was in her lower lumbar spine, caused by two herniated discs (L4 and L5). She also felt pain radiating all the way down her right leg to her foot.
Ginny saw a chiropractor three times a week, but the pain worsened. She then saw a pain management doctor who prescribed muscle relaxants, Neurontin (a nerve pain medication), and Mobic (a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug). After nine months, the pain was still intense, so she had injections in her back. They didn’t help.
As a result, Ginny had difficulty walking and found driving almost impossible. She also had trouble sleeping, managing to get only four or five hours a night. The constant pain in her lower back became worse when she was sitting, lifting something, or standing for long periods of time. Sometimes she could sit for only 20 minutes at a time. Because of all this, she spent most of her days in bed, where she was able to find a little relief when lying on her right side with her knees bent.
Ginny was unable to care for her two children, ages three and five, and she was also unable to work as much as she had before. She depended on her husband to drive her places since she could no longer drive herself. All of these factors created serious financial problems and emotional stress for the whole family. Ginny became depressed and angry at life. Although she had attended her first workshop with me before the accident and had been doing her meditations, after the accident she stopped meditating regularly because the pain got too severe and she said she couldn’t sit or concentrate.
After two years, her doctor suggested lumbar surgery to repair the herniated discs. If that didn’t work, he said, Ginny could consider additional surgery, including spinal fusion. She decided to go ahead with the initial surgery.
In the meantime, Ginny’s husband convinced her to attend another one of my advanced seminars in Seattle, which started just one week before her surgery date. Staying seated for the flight was painful, but she made it. While Ginny enjoyed seeing her old friends and meeting new ones at the event, she also felt saddened and frustrated because she couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm everyone else had. She just wanted to take some painkillers and go to bed. When she was leaving the first night’s gathering, her good friend Jill, filled with compassion and hope, said with conviction, “Ginny, you will be healed tomorrow—right here!” We started the next day at 6:00 A.M. Ginny decided to avoid taking any heavy medications so she could be present in the meditations and enjoy the experience. Unfortunately, her pain made it very difficult to focus during the first meditation and she wondered if the decision to attend had been a mistake.
During the second meditation after breakfast, though, things really shifted. Ginny decided to surrender and leave all her judgment behind. The meditation began as usual with the breathing exercise of pulling the mind out of the body, during which I told the participants to focus on two or three negative emotions or limited aspects of their personality. I asked them to move all that stored energy from the first three energy centers up from the base of their spine, all the way up to their brain—and eventually release it out of the top of their heads.
First, Ginny chose to work with her anger, which she believed had been a contributing factor in keeping her body in so much pain. During the meditation, she felt energy moving up her spine and then sensed an intense energy leaving her body through the back of her head. The second thing she picked to work with was her pain. As she worked with the breath to move much of the energy related to her pain from her body to her brain, she felt the same energy she had when she was working with anger, although this time she saw the energy become a bright color with purple overtones. Suddenly, she sensed the energy slow down and become less intense. The music changed, and the main part of the meditation began. Ginny was feeling completely relaxed. She had liberated that energy out of her body.
As usual, I guided the group to feel different parts of their bodies in space and to sense the space around their bodies. Then I guided them to the infinite black space that is the quantum field. I asked them to become no body, no one, no thing, no where, in no time and to become pure awareness—aware that they are aware in this endless vast space. At first, as I gave the instructions, Ginny had the distinct sense that she was floating. An intense sense of peace and unconditional love overtook her, and she lost track of time and space. She didn’t feel her physical body at all, nor did she feel any pain. Yet she was fully present and could hear and follow all the instructions I was giving.
“I never experienced anything like that before,” she told me later. “It was so profound that it’s difficult to put into words. My senses were magnified, and I felt connected to everybody, everyone, everything, every place, and every time. I was part of the whole, and the whole was part of me. There was no separation.”
Ginny got beyond her body, her environment, and time. Her consciousness had connected to the consciousness of the unified field (the place she described where there’s only wholeness and there’s no separation). She had found the sweet spot of the generous present moment, and her autonomic nervous system stepped in and did the healing for her.
In our advanced workshops, our students lie down after every meditation and surrender in order to allow the autonomic nervous system to take over and program their bodies. At the end of this meditation, when I asked everyone to come back to their new bodies, Ginny was surprised to discover that she felt absolutely no pain as she got up from the floor to stand—a process that she normally would have needed help with. She started walking without limping, her back straight.
We broke for lunch, but Ginny didn’t feel like eating much or even talking a lot. She was still overwhelmed with the meditation experience. After two years of near-constant pain, it felt so freeing to be without it anymore. She started crying tears of joy and confusion simultaneously. She looked for two of her friends to share the good news, including Jill (who had been so sure the night before that Ginny would be healed). They encouraged Ginny to try movements that she hadn’t been able to do when she was in pain—and she performed all of them without any pain at all. As the day continued, Ginny’s pain stayed away, and she continued to feel connected to the unified field.
That evening, Ginny called her husband, who told her that somehow he just knew she’d be able to heal her pain at the workshop. She had a great dinner with her friends, and when she went to bed, she didn’t take any of her pain medication or muscle relaxers. She slept through the night for the very first time in years, waking up filled with energy. The next day, I guided the group in a walking meditation (which you will read about and have a chance to try later). Ginny was able to walk straight and tall, with no pain or difficulty. Needless to say, she cancelled the surgery, and she has remained pain free.
Daniel Deals with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity
About five years ago, Daniel was (as he put it) a “crazy, stressed-out, Israeli entrepreneur” in his mid-20s who pushed himself daily to work at “full power all the way” to build a successful business. Working 60-hour weeks was typical for him. One day, while he was raging and yelling at the top of his lungs at a client over the phone, he felt something pop in the right side of his head and he lost consciousness. When he woke, he wasn’t sure what had happened or how long he had been out, but he had the worst headache of his life. He hoped resting would help it go away, but it didn’t.
Mysteriously, his pain increased exponentially whenever he was near anything that emitted electromagnetic frequencies, including cell phones, laptops, video displays, microphones, cameras, Wi-Fi networks, and cell towers. If someone near him answered a cell phone, Daniel felt it. He’d never before experienced anything like this—in fact, he had previously worked in the computer field and never felt any ill effects from being around electronic equipment of any kind.
Daniel saw several different doctors and specialists, but none of them could find anything wrong with him. He went through an extensive battery of blood tests, brain scans, and physical examinations, but every one of the studies came back negative. Some of the doctors didn’t believe him and even became condescending, rolling their eyes as if Daniel were making up his symptoms. Some wanted to give him antidepressants, but he wouldn’t take them. They told him his pain was all in his head (which, of course, it was, but not in the way the doctors meant).
Then Daniel started seeing holistic doctors who suspected he had developed a rare condition called electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS). While the existence of EHS is still controversial in the medical community, the World Health Organization recognizes the condition.1 The mechanism of EHS remains unknown, but when you consider that the brain is 78 percent water and that water containing minerals (such as those commonly found in the body, including calcium and magnesium) conducts electricity, you can see that for EHS-sensitive people, that natural electromagnetic charge might somehow become amplified around things that signal and emit electromagnetic radiation.
Like many others with EHS, Daniel also experienced chronic pain and fatigue in addition to his headaches. He’d sleep for 12 hours and still wake up exhausted. One of the holistic doctors suggested he take 40 nutritional supplements a day to combat the ill effects, but the supplements didn’t help. He was still in near-constant agony. Before long, Daniel had to close his business. He went into debt and lost everything he had worked so hard to acquire. Finally, he declared bankruptcy and had to move in with his mother.
“I basically retreated from life,” he told me. “I was a zombie because I couldn’t think, I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t do anything. Nothing I did helped, and whenever I got anywhere near the real world, I got a really strong headache.” In fact, Daniel told me that if he was ever near anything that emitted a signal, his headaches would be a thousand times worse—to the point that he would emotionally break down. Daniel spent most of his time curled up in a ball on his bed in his tiny room in his mother’s house, crying from the pain. “I was wasting my life,” he said, “watching all my friends get married, have children, get promoted, buy houses—everything.” When he began to feel suicidal, his friends and family pushed him to try to find something that would help.
Because of the chronic fatigue, depression, and severe pain, Daniel had only about a half hour of energy each day, so he started to use that time to find something that might help his condition. Three years after his symptoms began, he read my book You Are the Placebo.
“Something clicked,” he told me when I met him in a workshop I gave recently. “I knew this was the solution.” So he started doing the Changing Beliefs and Perceptions meditation I talk about in that book. Very gradually, over time, Daniel felt a little less pain, so he kept doing the meditation. After a while, he discovered my Blessing of the Energy Centers meditation, and he started doing that.
“The very first time I did it,” Daniel told me, “something happened that I didn’t know how to explain.” When he got to the sixth energy center, he said it was like a light show was going on in his head. He saw different areas of his brain that had been shut down suddenly start lighting up and communicating with each other. Then a huge beam of what he described as “loving light” shot out of the top of his head. His inward experience in that moment was more real than the memory of the past experience, which had created the pain in the first place.
From that point on, Daniel noticed a significant change. After meditating, he would have ten minutes without any pain at all. The pain-free periods kept getting longer and longer until a few months later, he was pain free. Then he got the idea that he should use the meditations to change his internal state while he was exposed to the electromagnetic fields that had been making him sick. So he started meditating in front of his cell phone and laptop. It was painful at first, but just as before, he’d eventually feel free of pain after meditating, and then those pain-free periods kept getting longer as time wore on.
Finally, Daniel was ready to take another big step. He hired a desk in a shared office space and decided to just sit there and meditate, surrounded by Wi-Fi, computers, microwaves, and all sorts of electromagnetic frequencies. Although the first few weeks were difficult, he found that it became easier as time wore on. After a while, he was meditating in that environment without pain for five hours a day. Eventually, his headaches just disappeared—and so did all his chronic pain and fatigue.
Today, Daniel considers himself 100 percent healed. He went back to work and got out of debt. Here’s the kicker: Daniel works only about an hour to an hour and a half a day, and he’s making way more money than he was when he was stressed out and trying to force his life into working the way he wanted it to. He’s also truly enjoying life.
Jennifer, in Sickness and in Health
Five years ago, Jennifer’s doctor diagnosed her with several new illnesses, in addition to the numerous other health issues she already suffered from. In total, her diagnoses included a few autoimmune disorders (lupus erythematosus and Sjögren’s syndrome with sicca complex), some gastrointestinal disorders (celiac disease, salicylate intolerance, and lactose intolerance), chronic asthma, kidney disease, arthritis, and vertigo so acute it often resulted in vomiting.
Every day was a struggle. Even just brushing her teeth was difficult because she lacked enough strength to hold her arm up for very long. Her partner, Jim, often had to brush her hair for her. When Jim was away on business, which was often, Jennifer had to take a nap after work so she could have enough strength to cook dinner.
“The hardest thing was that I felt like a terrible mother because I couldn’t do anything with my boys—and that broke my heart,” she told me. “I would have to sleep most of the weekend just to be able to get up to go to work Monday morning. All the happy pictures I posted on Facebook during the weekend were captured in about one hour.”
By this point, Jennifer weighed only 108 pounds and struggled to walk due to arthritis and severe swelling in her ankles and knees. She could no longer use her right hand to open containers or cut vegetables because of the pain and arthritis. At times she would lie in bed and hit her arms against her night table to stop the pain. Her body was in a constant state of acute inflammation, and even the specialists she saw said they couldn’t do anything more for her and that she had to learn to live with all her conditions as best she could. Although she never admitted it to anyone, she feared she might only have a few years left to live. She may have been ready to give up, but Jim wasn’t.
Every night Jim devoured books looking for alternative solutions, repeatedly encouraging Jennifer to keep going. Then Jim found You Are the Placebo and read about a woman with a similar condition who was able to heal herself. Jennifer and Jim agreed that she had to go to a workshop.
Two months later, in June 2014, Jennifer attended a weekend workshop in Sydney, Australia. She started to feel a bit better and registered for an advanced workshop in Mexico. Unfortunately, around the time she was scheduled to leave for the workshop, she developed an 8.5-millimeter kidney stone, and her doctor refused to let her fly. So she missed it, but she kept doing her meditations (getting up at 4:50 A.M. every day), and when I held the next advanced workshop in Australia the following year, both she and Jim attended.
“I remember the first night I could hardly make it up the stairs to our room, which was normal for me,” she reported. “But by the end of the workshop, I was walking around like a healthy person and didn’t have to use my asthma medication. The day before we left, Jim said that I was looking so well I should try some normal food. Apprehensive, I gave it a go—and no adverse effects! No pain, no asthma, no cramps, no headache—nothing! I think it was the best pizza I’ve ever had.”
When she did her meditations, Jennifer really gave it her all. She repeatedly tuned in to the potential of health and felt an abundance of energy throughout her body that could carry her all day long. In the meditation, when I asked the students to live from that new state of being, she imagined her feet hitting the ground and heard her breath as she joyfully ran. By the end of her meditation, she was crying tears of joy. Eventually, Jennifer conditioned her body to forget what illness feels like, looks like, sounds like, and tastes like by raising her energy, changing her frequency, reconditioning her body to a new mind, and signaling new genes to repair her body.
“Now I eat normal food,” she reports, “and I haven’t used my asthma medication since June 2015. I can walk up to ten miles a day and lift forty-five pounds. I’m training, and my goal is to complete a half marathon, which I will soon do.”
Felicia Overcomes Severe Eczema
Felicia had intermittently suffered from eczema and skin infections since she was three months old. The short-term relief provided by a strict diet and a regime of medications (creams, steroids, antihistamines, antifungals, antibiotics, and so on) never seemed to keep the condition at bay for long.
In 2016, as a 34-year-old medical doctor in the United Kingdom, Felicia found herself becoming increasingly frustrated by the limitations of her profession. After a decade of clinical practice where she’d seen more than 70,000 patients, she began to recognize a similar sense of frustration and disconnect emerging from her patients as well. While seeking more satisfying science-based solutions, she came across my work. Intrigued by possibility and hungry for alternative evidence-based ideas and solutions, Felicia signed up for a weekend workshop.
“The event was life changing,” she says. “It gave me the tools to reevaluate and update my previous limited beliefs about myself, as well as what our bodies are truly capable of.” The breathing technique was particularly intriguing to her. “I must confess,” she says, “that I remained a little skeptical and held back, not allowing myself to truly surrender to the process.”
During the months that followed, Felicia continued to meditate daily. Her skin improved and she successfully manifested a new relationship in her life. Feeling inspired, she sought new ways to pivot within her medical practice to adopt a more holistic approach. But to her great disappointment, all the United Kingdom medical indemnity bodies refused to insure any nonconventional approaches. Felicia felt trapped, and in December 2016, her eczema and skin infections returned.
Even so, she continued meditating and even signed up for an advanced workshop, creating her Mind Movie in preparation (a powerful tool for manifesting various things you want, which you will read about in a later chapter). She had very clear intentions for her future and included images of healthy skin, as well as a picture of a microphone on a stage with the affirmation “I inspire others by sharing truth fearlessly.”
On the first day of the advanced workshop, we did the breathing technique to activate the pineal gland, and this time, Felicia decided not to hold back and to completely surrender to the process. “I noticed my breathing begin to hasten,” she remembers. “An overwhelming energy started building in my throat. This intensified until my throat felt as if it was going to close up. Fearful, I pulled my body out of this position and returned back to my old state of being for the remainder of the meditation.”
The following day, for the last meditation, Felicia was being fitted with the brain mapping equipment. She considered what an amazing opportunity it was to experience this new level of information. Feeling trapped in a profession that preaches limitation, she had the thought: What if I could demonstrate to the skeptic, as well as to believers, how unlimited we all really are? With this thought, she wanted to use this breath to connect to the unified field—with an elevated emotion of pure freedom and liberation—no matter what happened.
When the meditation began, she opened up to possibility and to the unknown. She quickly noticed that her breathing started to change and the overwhelming energy began to build in her throat. Each time the sensations intensified, instead of allowing them to overcome her as she had done the previous day, she stayed with the process. She returned her body to the present moment, ignoring the distraction, and placed all her energy and awareness on connecting to the field, to truth, and to love. Her body was persistently defiant, but after repeatedly overcoming her internal struggles, her body eventually surrendered.
“What I experienced on the other side was an exhilarating explosion of energy in my brain and an instantaneous connection with a loving consciousness within and all around me,” she says. “It was an absolute knowing, a recognition of pure love, and with it came the most overwhelming emotion of joy that I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. It was like coming home. I just experienced this deep oneness. All the while I remained completely aware of all my external senses. I could hear the scientists behind me saying ‘seizure.’” We had some new members on our team of neuroscientists, and they had never seen that kind of energy in the brain before.
As a medical doctor, Felicia might normally have been concerned at that somewhat alarming statement, but she understood that in that moment she was experiencing absolute truth and freedom for the very first time. For a few hours following her meditation, she felt somewhat dazed but physically lighter than before.
If you review the brain scans in Graphics 7A–7C, you can see Felicia’s brain showing the classic changes that we witness when there is high energy in the brain. She starts in normal beta brain waves and then transitions into high-beta brain waves before she hits a high-energy gamma state. The energy in gamma brain waves is 190 standard deviations above normal. The area surrounding the pineal gland as well as the part of the brain that processes strong emotion is highly activated.
During the next few days, Felicia began to experience a sense of fearlessness and playfulness emerging from within her. She also experienced a string of synchronicities—including manifesting the scene from her Mind Movie where she was speaking into a microphone onstage. In fact, without knowing that scene had been in her Mind Movie, I pulled her onstage to share her experience. It was only once she returned home that she noticed her eczema was no longer bothering her.
“I looked at my skin, and all the rashes that had been there just a few days prior had completely resolved,” she reported. (Look at Graphic 7D in the color insert. The first pictures were taken before the event. The second set of pictures was taken the next day, after the event. Her eczema is gone.)
To this day Felicia takes no further medication and her skin is clear. Her life continues to unfold in new, exciting, and surprising ways.
“I am so grateful for the realization that we are all unlimited,” she told me. “Mark my words, if a once jaded, intensely analytical doctor can do it, absolutely anyone can.”