Three Stories of Personal Transformation
In this chapter you’ll meet a few folks who put the energy of their consciousness into the immaterial world beyond the senses and repeatedly embraced a possibility until it materialized into their lives.
Laurie’s Story
At age 19, Laurie was diagnosed with a rare degenerative bone disease, called polyostotic fibrous dysplasia. In this debilitating condition, the body replaces normal bone with a cheaper, fibrous tissue, and the skeleton’s supportive protein scaffolding becomes uncharacteristically thin and irregular. The atypical growth process associated with the syndrome causes bones to swell, weaken, and then fracture. Fibrous dysplasia can occur in any part of the skeleton, and in Laurie’s body, it manifested in her right femur, right hip socket, right tibia, and some of the bones of her right foot. Her doctors told her the disease had no cure.
Fibrous dysplasia is a genetic condition that usually doesn’t manifest until adolescence. In Laurie’s case, she spent a whole year limping painfully around her college campus with what turned out to be a femoral fracture, before any sign of the disease surfaced. She was shocked to hear she’d broken a bone, because she hadn’t suffered any trauma. Other than one foot being anatomically larger than the other, Laurie hadn’t seen any evidence that anything was wrong with her until that point. She’d lived a relatively active youth filled with activities like running, dancing, and playing tennis. At the time she began limping, she’d even begun training as a competitive bodybuilder.
After the diagnosis, Laurie’s life changed overnight. Her orthopedic surgeon warned her that she was fragile and extremely vulnerable. He insisted that she walk only with crutches until he could schedule her for surgery: first a bone graft, followed by the insertion of a Russell-Taylor femoral nail down the bone shaft. After hearing that news, both Laurie and her mother spent an hour crying in the hospital cafeteria. It was like some sort of nightmare; Laurie’s life, as she knew it, seemed to be suddenly over.
Laurie’s perception of her limitations—both real and imagined—began to dominate her life. To avoid additional fractures, she followed the surgeon’s orders and dutifully used the crutches. She had to quit the marketing internship she’d recently begun with a major Manhattan product manufacturer and, instead, began filling her days with medical appointments. Her father insisted she see as many orthopedic specialists as possible, so her weeping mother drove Laurie from doctor’s office to doctor’s office over the next several weeks.
Each time she saw a new doctor, Laurie would patiently wait for a different medical opinion, only to receive the same bad news again. In just a few months, ten surgeons had weighed in on her condition. The last physician she saw did have a different opinion: He told Laurie that the surgery the other doctors had recommended absolutely wouldn’t help her, because inserting the nail would strengthen the diseased bone only in the weakest location and would actually cause more fractures in the next most vulnerable area above or below the nail. He advised Laurie to forget about surgery and continue using crutches or a wheelchair—or simply become sedentary for the rest of her life.
From then on, Laurie remained still most of the time for fear she might break a bone. She felt powerless, small, and fragile, and she was filled with anxiety and self-pity. She did return to college a month later, but stayed largely cooped up in an apartment that she shared with five other women. She cultivated an impressive ability to cloak a severe and mounting clinical depression.
Fearing Her Father
Laurie’s father had been a violent man for as long as she could remember. Even once his children were grown, each member of the family had to be prepared for the wrath of this man’s quick-moving fists at the most unexpected of moments. Everyone was constantly in a state of vigilance, wondering when his temper would flare next. Although Laurie certainly didn’t know it at the time, her father’s behavior was intrinsically connected to her condition.
Newborns spend the vast majority of their days in the delta brain-wave state. During the first 12 years, children gradually progress to a theta state and then to an alpha state, before they get to the beta state they’ll spend most of their adulthood in. As you read earlier, theta and alpha are highly suggestible brain-wave states. Young children don’t yet have an analytical mind to edit or to make sense of what happens to them, so all of the information they absorb from their experiences is encoded directly into their subconscious minds. Because of their increased suggestibility, the moment they feel emotionally altered from some experience, they pay attention to whoever or whatever caused it and so are conditioned to form associative memories connecting that cause to the emotion of the experience itself. If it’s a parent, then over time, children will attach to that caregiver and think that the emotions they feel from the experience are normal, because they don’t yet have the ability to analyze the situation. This is how early-childhood experiences become subconscious states of being.
Although Laurie didn’t know this when her condition was diagnosed, the emotionally charged events she experienced growing up with her father had been branded into her implicit memory system beyond her conscious mind, programming her biology. Her reaction to her father’s anger—feeling weak, powerless, vulnerable, stressed, and fearful every single day—then became part of her autonomic nervous system so that her body chemically memorized these emotions and the environment signaled the genes associated with her disorder to turn on. Because that response was autonomic, she wouldn’t be able to change it as long as she stayed trapped in her emotional body. She could only analyze her state of being equal to the emotions of her past, even though the answers she needed existed beyond those emotions.
Once Laurie received the fibrous dysplasia diagnosis, her mother immediately proclaimed to the entire family that Laurie had been officially pronounced “fragile” by modern medicine—so she was safe from her father’s physical violence. Although he continued to emotionally and verbally abuse Laurie (right up until his death 15 years later), her disease, ironically, protected her from further physical abuse.
Cementing Her Identity in Disease
This perverse sense of safety that Laurie created became a vehicle of survival for her. As a result, she began to benefit from special treatment (which she almost always needed). Whether getting a seat on the bus or subway when there was standing room only, getting her friends to wait in line for events while she sat on a nearby bench, or getting a seat quickly in a crowded restaurant, Laurie found that her disease began to work for her. She started relying heavily on her ailment to get what she wanted. She was now able to manage better in a world that she’d never before viewed as safe. The emotional benefit of manipulating her reality to get what she wanted in this way became very convenient, and Laurie received far more than she really needed to take stress off her body to prevent injury. Before long, her disease became her identity.
Laurie next developed a late-adolescent rebellion against the life that she thought had been thrust upon her by her doctors, her parents, and fate. By the next semester after her diagnosis, she went into a solid state of denial about her disease. She decided to become the first “gimpy” bodybuilder, returning to the sport with complete devotion. Blindly obsessive, while white-knuckling it and forcing a positive attitude solely with her conscious mind, Laurie found creative ways to bear weight that wouldn’t twist her limbs.
She thought that by trying to push through the pain, she’d become healthier—although in truth, her efforts backfired, because she felt awful most of the time and her pain worsened. As sometimes happens with polyostotic fibrous dysplasia patients, Laurie also developed scoliosis and suffered from severe back pain daily. By the time she was in her 20s, she began to develop arthritis in her spine and elsewhere.
After she graduated from college, despite shuttling herself between a new house and a new job, Laurie became very sedentary and felt even more removed from life. Her fear, anxiety, and depression remained. She envied most of her peers and lost friendships and romantic interests because she lived more like her elderly parents than like a young adult.
By her late 20s, Laurie used a cane all the time to get around, even when she wasn’t nursing one of the 12 serious fractures she’d eventually endure. As if those issues weren’t enough, she also experienced dangerous microfractures. Her bones were so weak that bigger stress fractures would appear beneath the microscopic fissures and connect to other areas of weakened bone to form even bigger fractures that could be seen on an x-ray.
By age 30, Laurie had more back problems than her 72-year-old father, and she essentially became old before her time. She rested in bed for days and missed so many weeks of work that she was forced to quit jobs. She put graduate school on hold, because the school that accepted her didn’t have a working elevator. She had to forgo parties, museum outings, shopping, traveling, concerts, and other activities that would have involved a lot of standing or walking. She was caught in the thinking-and-feeling loop I talked about earlier: thinking that she was limited and fragile on the inside, while her body manifested limitedness and fragility on the outside. The more she felt vulnerable and weak, the more vulnerable and weak she became—while continuing to experience fractures that reinforced her belief that she was frail, and further reaffirming her identity and validating her state of being.
She adjusted her diet and took various vitamins and supplements in addition to bone-strengthening drugs, but nothing seemed to stop the fractures. She could fracture a bone from just walking up a flight of stairs or even stepping off a curb. It was like waiting for the next nightmare in a series.
Ironically, when Laurie wasn’t using crutches or limping, she looked perfectly healthy. Most people assumed that her cane was some sort of eccentric accessory, and many didn’t believe Laurie really had a debilitating condition, which made it difficult and frustrating at times to receive the special treatment she often needed. Trying to convince people that she really had a disease further solidified her identity as a sick person, set her intention to prove she was handicapped, and anchored her belief about her disabled status. While the rest of the world seemed to work very hard to hide their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, Laurie found that she was constantly announcing hers.
She spent a lot of energy trying to control as much as possible in her environment. She paid careful attention to everything she ate and drank, measuring everything she consumed. Every walk around her neighborhood was calculated. She even weighed how much she could carry home from the supermarket: ten pounds, which was also the limit of the weight she could gain before her bones would worsen.
It was exhausting, but it was all Laurie knew to do. Her range of options got narrower and narrower as she kept limiting the scope of things that she could do physically in an attempt to keep from fracturing. As her lifestyle became narrower, her mind became narrower along with it. Laurie’s fears increased, her depression worsened, and eventually, she tried to work again but couldn’t even hold down a job.
This same woman who’d once been a runner, dancer, and competitive bodybuilder was now limited to doing only yoga for fitness, and by her late 30s, even hatha yoga had come to be too much for her. For years, her exercise was limited to sitting in a chair and doing vigorous breathing (although in her early 40s, her doctor finally allowed her to take up lap swimming).
She did make some attempts at healing through therapists, holistic doctors, energy healers, sound healers, and homeopaths—always seeking solutions outside of herself. A few times, she’d feel better after an energy healing and go straight to the orthopedist and demand new x-rays—only to be deflated when the results came back unchanged. She thought, Maybe this is as good as it’s ever going to get. She awoke overwhelmed each morning, overcome with a feeling of dread, convinced she couldn’t handle whatever the world had in store for her.
Laurie Learns What’s Possible
Laurie and I met in 2009, after she had seen What the Bleep Do We Know!? and become transfixed by the concept that a person could possibly create a totally new life. I happened to meet her while eating dinner before a workshop I was teaching at a retreat center near New York. We talked about the courses I gave on personal change, and she immediately registered for my next class that August.
When Laurie came to her first event, she heard that it was absolutely possible to change your brain, your thoughts, your body, your emotional state, and your genetic expression. During the workshop, I talked about physical change, but Laurie’s beliefs about her disease and her body were tenacious and her emotions were stuck quite firmly in her past. She had absolutely no intention of healing her body, mostly because she didn’t really believe it was even possible. She came because she just wanted to feel better on the inside.
Laurie immediately applied the principles I taught as best she could, even though she couldn’t seem to feel different by choice. The very first thing she did, almost immediately after that first weekend course, was to stop sharing her diagnosis with others. Even though she couldn’t control her emotions, she figured that she still had control over what she said out loud. So unless she needed to ask for a chair at a party or explain to a date why she couldn’t take a walk with him, she stopped acknowledging her condition altogether. Laurie chose to focus on where she was headed in her future: toward a happy inner self, a deep connection to some unknown divine source, a wonderful job that she excelled at, a life partner, and close and healthy relationships with friends and relatives.
Laurie next concentrated on changing a few simple behaviors. She watched her thoughts and words, and reminded herself repeatedly to stop her old, repetitive, destructive patterns. She kept doing the meditations and taking my courses. In order to assign meaning to what she was doing, she reread her class notes religiously and kept in touch with as many fellow students as she could. In time, some small but perceptible percentage of the day, Laurie felt better, taller, abler, and stronger. She’d say “Change” to herself 20 times a day, whenever she noticed her mind drifting to her past. Although negative thoughts sneaked through a hundred times a day, little by little, Laurie created a few new thoughts, wrote them down, and attempted to believe them deeply.
Laurie worked hard at it, but it took almost two years before she could really feel those new thoughts. Instead of getting frustrated during that waiting period, Laurie reminded herself that it had taken quite a long time to create the disease from her emotional state, so it might take some time to uncreate it. She also reminded herself that she’d have to go through a biological, neurological, chemical, and genetic death of the old self before the new self emerged.
The circumstances in her external environment got worse before they got better. A flood trashed Laurie’s home, and other situations in her apartment building created some new health problems. Laurie told me that every time she’d sit down to do her meditation and rehearse her ideal life, she felt as if she were telling herself a lie—and afterward, opening her eyes to her current circumstances felt like a slap in the face. I encouraged her to stop defining reality with her senses and to keep crossing the river of change.
Laurie kept limping in to the workshops, grumpy at times and grateful at others, and she kept at the work. She also assembled as many local fellow students as she could to meditate together. Hardly any situations in Laurie’s life were pleasing, so she thought, What the hell, I may as well have one hour a day behind my own eyelids where reality looks different, where I have a pain-free body, a safe and quiet home, and a full and loving relationship with the outside world and with my friends and family.
In early 2012, during one of my progressive workshops, Laurie had a significant deepening in her meditation experience. She was literally and figuratively rocked to her core. Physically, it was like a disturbance and then a release. Her body shook, her face contorted, and her arms flew up as she tried her best to stay rooted to her chair. Emotionally, it was inexplicable joy. She cried, she laughed, and sounds came out of her mouth that she couldn’t explain. All of the fear and control that she’d previously used to hold herself together was finally loosening. For the first time, she felt a divine presence and knew she was no longer alone.
Laurie told me, “I sensed something, someone, some divine presence, and this consciousness wasn’t ignorant to my existence and unconcerned with my welfare, as I apparently previously believed. This consciousness has actually been paying attention. Realizing that was an overwhelming change for me.” All the energy she’d been putting into controlling her physical movements and her life in general finally began to relax and unwind, and the energy she’d been using to maintain that control started to free up.
At the next event, I noticed that Laurie was walking without a cane or any limp. She was happy, smiling, and laughing to herself, instead of irritated, frowning, and wincing in pain. She was transmuting fear into courage, frustration into patience, pain into joy, and weakness into strength. She was beginning to change—on the inside and the outside. Free from the addiction of those limiting emotions, her body was now living less in the past as she moved toward a new future.
In early spring of 2012, Laurie’s orthopedist told her during a regular checkup that about two-thirds of the length of a fracture she’d had in her femur since she was 19 (a fracture that had shown up on every one of the hundred or so x-rays she’d had so far) had vanished. He had no explanation to offer but, instead, suggested she begin riding a stationary bicycle at the gym for ten minutes, twice a week. The message was music to Laurie’s ears, and off she went.
Success and Setbacks
All of Laurie’s work in crossing the river of change was now starting to pay off. She was finally getting feedback that let her know she was making some type of physical progress. Each day, as Laurie got beyond her body, her environment, and time, she was also getting beyond the personality that was connected to her present and past external reality, beyond her emotionally addicted and habituated body, and beyond the predictable future that she’d always expected, based on her memory of the past. All of her effort to supersede her analytical mind, change her brain waves to those of a more suggestible state, find the present moment, and venture into the programming system where she was emotionally altered earlier in her life was finally changing her.
Laurie started to really believe that her mind was healing her body by thought alone. And the old fracture that was connected to the old self was healing, because she was literally becoming someone else. She was no longer firing and wiring the circuits in her brain that were connected to the old personality, because she was no longer thinking and acting in the same ways. She stopped conditioning her body to the same mind by reliving her past with the same emotions. She was “unmemorizing” being her old self and remembering being a new self—that is, firing and wiring new thoughts and actions in her brain by changing her mind and emotionally teaching her body what her future self would feel like.
Laurie was signaling new genes in new ways during her daily meditation by simply changing her state of being. Those genes were making new proteins that were healing the proteins responsible for the fractures related to her “dis-ease.” From what she learned in the workshops, she reasoned that her bone cells needed to get the right signal from her mind in order to turn off the gene of fibrous dysplasia and turn on the gene for the production of a normal bone matrix.
Laurie explained:
I knew that over the years, all of those fractures had manifested structurally from the unhealthy protein expression in my bone cells, because I had been living by the survival emotions of fear, victimization, and pain—and I felt weak. I was powerful enough to manifest weakness perfectly in my body. I had programmed the genes to stay on, because I’d memorized those emotions subconsciously in my body. And my body, as my mind, was always living in the past. So I figured, if bones are made of collagen—which is a protein—and I wanted my bone cells to make some healthy collagen, I’d have to enter my autonomic nervous system, get beyond my analytical mind, enter into the subconscious mind, repeatedly reprogram my body with new information, and allow it to receive new orders every day. When I received the good news, I felt like I was halfway across the river of change.
Laurie kept her meditations going and continued to take my workshops. She continued to have times of physical pain, but the frequency, intensity, and duration decreased considerably. She changed as many things as she possibly could. She changed gyms just for a different environment. She put her deodorant on the right side first instead of the left. She folded her arms left over right instead of the more natural right over left, whenever she could remember to do so. She sat in a different chair in her apartment. She slept on the other side of the bed (even though it meant walking all the way around to the far side of the room to get in and out of bed).
She reported, “Ridiculous as that may sound, I was just intent on giving my body as many new and different signals as possible, and since moving to a big house in the Hamptons wasn’t realistic, these tiny things would have to do.”
Laurie even put notes everywhere in her environment to remind herself to stay conscious and to elicit thoughts and feelings about her future. She wrote, “I am grateful,” “Elevate!” and “Love!” on painter’s tape and stuck the notes on the backs of several doors. She stuck a sticky note on her dashboard that read, “Your thoughts are incredibly powerful. Choose yours wisely.” Encouraging notes and affirmations weren’t new to her, but she’d never had the capacity to believe them before because she hadn’t known how to change her beliefs.
In late January 2013, when she saw her orthopedist again, he told her for the first time in 28 years that she had no evidence of fractures—none. Her bones were whole and undamaged. She wrote to me, “I cannot convey in words the joy this brought me. I now felt empowered and lifted. I know I am more than halfway across the river of change.”
Her bone cells were now programmed to make new, healthy proteins. Her autonomic nervous system was restoring balance within her body physically, chemically, and emotionally. It was doing the healing for her, through a greater intelligence, and she knew she could trust and surrender more to it now. Her body was continuing to respond to a new mind.
The month after her appointment with the orthopedist, Laurie flew to Arizona for one of my advanced workshops. An hour after she arrived, she received a phone call from the doctor’s assistant, who told her that the results from her blood and urine tests were back and they indicated that her disease was actually still quite active. Her doctor recommended that she resume intravenous bisphosphonate therapy for the first time in many years.
Laurie was heartbroken. The x-rays had left her with the impression that she was whole again, but the lab tests indicated otherwise. Within seconds, she had lost perspective and was certain she’d failed. When she told me the news, I reassured her that her body was still living in the past and just needed more time to catch up with her mind. I suggested she continue to do the work for a few more months and retake the urine test then.
Inspired by some of the folks in our workshops who’d changed their health, Laurie went home and did her practice in earnest, feeling more vividly and intensely in her meditations the life that she could have. She stopped imagining herself with healed bones per se, and just imagined herself as whole in general—vital, glowing, resilient, youthful, and in energetic, good health. She mentally rehearsed and emotionally embraced having everything she wanted, which included a functional, walking body. She told herself that the old lady she’d been from ages 19 to 47 was just a story from the past.
New Mind, New Body
Over the next few months, Laurie simply began to feel happier, more joyful, freer, and healthier. She began to think with more clarity about her future. She rarely felt pain in her body and walked without any assistance.
When May 2013 arrived, she was feeling some trepidation about her appointment to retake the lab test. She postponed the appointment until June. Then Laurie discussed her hesitation and anxiety with an experienced workshop student, who asked her to think about some good things she could imagine related to walking into the hospital and taking the test. At this point, Laurie realized she had lots of positive, life-giving emotional resources to draw on. She began reciting a long list, including how clean the hospital was, how helpful all the staff always were, what an easy place it was to go to just be taken care of. It was exactly the shift in focus she needed.
On the day of the appointment, as she drove to the hospital, Laurie gave thanks for the sunshine, for how well traffic was moving, for her car, for her leg that was helping to operate the car, for her perfect eyesight, for the parking spot she easily found, and so on. As she later described to me, “I went inside, gave them my name, shut my eyes, and meditated in the waiting room until it was my turn. I peed in a cup, handed the nurse the bag, and walked out, giving thanks for the simple act of walking. And I let go of the result—entirely. I was okay, deep down inside, with either outcome. It enabled me to forget about it entirely, because I wasn’t expecting anything. I felt happy, in fact, obsessively grateful. I stopped analyzing and just trusted.”
She remembered my saying that the moment she began to analyze how or when her healing would happen, it would mean she was just returning back to the old self, because the new self would never think in that unsure way. Laurie continued, “And so, for no reason, I was simply grateful in the present moment ahead of the actual experience. I wasn’t waiting for the results to make me happy or thankful; I was in a state of authentic gratitude and in love with life as if it had already happened. I no longer needed something outside of me to make me happy. I was already whole and happy, because something inside of me was more whole and complete.”
She had almost nothing on any external “grand scale” by which to measure success, satisfaction, and security—not income, a house, a partner, a business, a child, not even any recent volunteer work she was particularly proud of. But Laurie had the love of her friends and those family members whom she could connect with. And she had a newfound love for herself. She’d realized that she’d never had self-love before—only self-interest. She told me later that it was a distinction that she never could have understood in her previous, narrow state of mind. She felt quite content with herself and her life. She said, “And for the first time since I began this journey, I just didn’t care about the test. I was happy with myself.”
Two joyful weeks later, the test results came back. The doctor’s assistant told Laurie, “Your results are perfectly normal. You scored a 40. Your values are down from an abnormal, elevated level of 68, just five months ago.”
Laurie had crossed the river and was on the shores of a new life. There was no evidence of her past living in her body any longer. She was free—born anew.
Laurie told me later:
It occurred to me in an instant that my identity as “patient” and “sick person with a disease” had become stronger than any other role I’d played in life. I had pretended to be that person, but all along I knew I wasn’t. All of my attention and energy were consumed with being a patient instead of with being a woman, a girlfriend, a daughter, an employee, or even just a happy and whole person. I now know that I had no available energy to be anyone else until I took my attention off my old personality and old self, and reinvested my attention and energy into a new self. I’m so grateful that now I’m me instead of that!
Laurie now has no regrets and no significant resentments, and she feels no loss over the past. As she puts it, “I wouldn’t want to judge or hold a grudge or feel forsaken from my past, because that choice would take away this feeling of wholeness. It’s as if my past condition was actually a blessing, because I overcame my own limitations and now I’m in love with who I am. I’m at peace. I am truly changed on the biological and cellular level. I am proof of the message that your mind can heal your body, and believe me, no one is more surprised than I am.”
Candace’s Story
Candace’s relationship, barely a year old, just wasn’t working. After their first few months together, she and her boyfriend became deeply embroiled in incessant fighting, volatile accusations, constant mistrust, and ceaseless acts of blame. They both felt jealous and insecure, so their communications were frustrating, at best. They each were haunted by unfulfilled expectations that the other had no hope of satisfying. In a rage she’d never known, Candace found herself in violent screaming matches, throwing uncontrollable tantrums. These fits left her feeling more unworthy, more victimized, and more insecure. All of this behavior was new to her; she hadn’t been an angry, frustrated, or upset person before, and she’d never thrown a tantrum in all the 28 years of her life.
Although she knew on a gut level that staying in those circumstances wasn’t benefiting her, Candace couldn’t escape the emotional attachment to this unhealthy relationship. Yet as she became addicted to her stressful emotions, this became her new identity. Her personal reality was creating her new personality. Candace’s external environment was controlling how she was thinking, acting, and feeling. She’d become a victim trapped in her own life.
Flooded with the strong energy of survival emotions, Candace began to operate like an addict, needing that emotional rush of feelings and believing that it was something out there that was causing her to feel and think and react in certain ways. She couldn’t think or act greater than how she felt. Imprisoned in this emotional state, she was re-creating the same thoughts, the same choices, the same behaviors, and the same experiences over and over again.
Candace was actually using her boyfriend and all of the conditions in her outer world to reaffirm who she thought she was. Her need to feel anger, frustration, insecurity, unworthiness, fear, and victimization was associated with that relationship. Even though it wasn’t serving her greatest ideal, she was too afraid of change to remedy the situation. In fact, she became so bonded to those emotions, because they reaffirmed her identity, that she would rather feel those familiar toxic feelings constantly than leave and embrace the unfamiliar—to step from the known into the unknown. Candace began to believe that she was her emotions, and as a result, she memorized a personality based on the past that she’d created.
About three months after things began to really go downhill, Candace’s body couldn’t sustain the stress of that heightened emotional state, and her hair started falling out in very large chunks; within weeks, almost a third of it was gone. She began experiencing severe migraines, chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, poor concentration, insomnia, weight gain, consistent pain, and myriad other debilitating symptoms—all of them quietly destroying her.
An intuitive young woman, Candace innately felt that this “dis-ease” was a self-inflicted product of her own emotional issues. Just thinking about her relationship would physiologically knock her out of balance in preparation for another conflict. Candace was turning on stress hormones and her autonomic nervous system by thought alone. And when she thought about her partner, or talked or complained about their relationship to her family and friends, she was conditioning her body to the mind of those emotions. It was the ultimate mind-body connection, and because she couldn’t turn off the stress response, eventually she began downregulating genes. Her thoughts were literally making her sick.
Six months into the relationship, Candace was still living in utter dysfunction, at the highest levels of stress. Even though she was sure by now that the symptoms in her body were a warning sign, she subconsciously continued to choose the same reality, which was now her normal state of being. Barraging her body with negative survival emotions, Candace was signaling the wrong genes in the wrong ways. She felt that she was slowly dying from the inside out, and she knew she needed to take control of her life but had no idea how to go about doing it. She couldn’t find the courage to leave the relationship, so she remained in it for over a year, living in a habitual mire of resentment and anger the entire time. Justified or not in feeling those emotions, Candace watched her body pay the price.
Candace Pays the Piper
In November 2010, Candace finally saw a medical doctor, who diagnosed her with Hashimoto’s disease (also referred to as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis or chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis), an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the thyroid gland. The condition is marked by hypothyroidism (an underactive thyroid) with occasional bouts of hyperthyroidism (an overactive thyroid). Symptoms of Hashimoto’s include weight gain, depression, mania, sensitivity to heat and cold, numbness, chronic fatigue, panic attacks, abnormal heart rate, high cholesterol, low blood sugar, constipation, migraines, muscle weakness, joint stiffness, cramps, memory loss, vision problems, infertility, and hair loss—many of which Candace was experiencing.
During the consultation, the endocrinologist told Candace that her condition was genetic and she could do nothing about it. She would have Hashimoto’s for the rest of her life and would need to take thyroid medication indefinitely, because her antibody count would never change. Although Candace discovered later that she actually had no family history of this illness, the die seemed cast.
Having an actual diagnosis gave Candace the unexpected gift of awareness. She’d clearly needed a wake-up call, and this was it. The physical breakdown of her body had caused her to reflect on her past and really see the truth of who she was being. It dawned on her that she was single-handedly responsible for creating an autoimmune illness that was slowly destroying her physically, emotionally, and mentally. She was living a life in constant-emergency fashion. All of her body’s energy was going toward keeping her safe in her external environment, and no energy was left for her internal environment. Her immune system couldn’t manage itself any longer.
Despite the gut-wrenching fear of change and of the unfamiliar, Candace finally chose to leave the relationship five months later. She fully understood that the relationship had been unhealthy and not served her. She asked herself, What’s the trade-off? Stay in the dysfunction and propel myself deeper into darkness? Or choose freedom and possibility? This is my chance for a new and different life.
Candace’s adversity became the genesis for her personal evolution, self-reflection, and expansion. She found herself standing on the edge of the cliff, wanting to leap into the unknown. Her decision to jump and to change became a passionate experience. So jump she did, into what she saw as endless possibilities and potentials, compelled by a desire to finally stop doing what was no longer loving to her so that she could rewrite her biological code.
This was a turning point in Candace’s life. She’d read my two previous books and been to one of my beginning workshops, so she knew that if she embraced her diagnosis and the emotions of fear, worry, anxiety, and sadness it inspired, she would be autosuggesting and believing only in thoughts equal to those feelings. She could try to think positively, but her body was feeling bad, so that would have real consequences. Making that choice would be the wrong placebo, the wrong state of being.
So Candace chose instead not to accept her illness. She respectfully declined the physician’s diagnosis, reminding herself that the mind that creates illness is the same mind that creates wellness. She knew she had to change her beliefs about the condition given to her by the medical community. Candace chose not to be suggestible to her doctor’s advice and opinions, because she wasn’t fearful, victimized, or sad.
In fact, she was optimistic and enthusiastic, and those emotions drove a new set of thoughts that allowed her to see a new possibility. She didn’t accept her diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment; believe hastily in the most probable outcome or future destiny; or permanently surrender to the diagnosis or treatment plan. She didn’t condition her body to that future worst-case scenario, expect the same predictable outcome that everyone else did, or assign the same meaning that everyone else with the condition did. She had a different attitude, so she was now in a different state of being.
Candace Gets Busy
Even though Candace didn’t accept her condition, she had a lot of work ahead of her. She knew that to change her belief about her disease, she’d have to make a choice with an amplitude of energy that was greater than the hardwired programs in her brain and the emotional addictions in her body so that her body could respond to a new mind. Only then could she experience the necessary change in energy that she needed to rewrite her subconscious programs and erase her past neurologically and genetically—which is exactly what began to happen.
Although she had heard me say all of this before and knew the material intellectually, Candace had never embraced the information from personal experience. In the first workshop she attended after getting the diagnosis, she looked exhausted and kept falling asleep in her chair. I knew she was struggling.
When she came to her next workshop, she’d been taking thyroid medication to regulate her imbalanced chemical state for a little over a month, and she was more alert and interested. Candace was incredibly inspired by the stories I told during the weekend. When she heard that others weren’t going to be victims of the circumstances in their external worlds and that uncommon healings could happen, she decided that she was going to be her own science project.
So Candace embarked on the journey. Having an understanding of epigenetics and neuroplasticity from my workshops, she knew she was no longer a victim of the disease and, instead, used her knowledge to become proactive. She assigned a different meaning to her future and so had a different intention. She awoke every day at 4:30 A.M. to do her meditation and began to emotionally condition her body to a new mind. She worked on finding the present moment, which she realized had been lost to her before.
Candace wanted to be happy and healthy, so she fought hard to regain her life. Even so, she struggled in the beginning and got very frustrated when she couldn’t sit for any extended period of time. Her body had been trained to be the mind of frustration, anger, impatience, and victimization, and it understandably rebelled. As though she were training an undisciplined animal, Candace had to keep settling her body down to the present moment. Every time she went through that process, she was reconditioning her body to a new mind and freeing herself a bit more from the chains of her emotional addiction.
Every day in her meditations, Candace worked on overcoming her body, her environment, and time. She refused to get up as the same person who’d sat down to do the meditation, because the old Candace was the one who became angry and frustrated and was so chemically addicted to her external circumstances. She didn’t want to be that person anymore. She listened to her meditations, emulated a new state of being, and wouldn’t stop until she was in love with life—in a true state of gratitude for no particular reason.
Candace applied all the knowledge that she’d learned from my workshops and from listening to every audio CD, reading every book (more than once), and studying her notes from the courses. She was wiring new information into her brain to prepare herself for a new experience of healing. More and more often, she found that she could refrain from firing and wiring the old neural connections of anger, frustration, resentment, arrogance, and mistrust and that she could begin to fire and wire the new neural connections of love, joy, compassion, and kindness. In doing so, Candace knew she was pruning away the old connections and sprouting new ones. And the more times she made the effort with a level of mental fortitude, the more she would transform.
In time, she became incredibly grateful to be alive, realizing that where harmony existed, incoherence couldn’t abide. She told herself, I am not the old Candace, and I’m not reaffirming that existence any longer. For months on end, she persevered. And if she found herself being driven to that lowest common denominator, being angry or frustrated at the conditions in her external world, or feeling sick or unhappy, she would very quickly make a conscious shift. By swiftly changing her state of being, she could shorten the periods in which those emotions had a hold on her so that she was overall less moody, less temperamental, and less like her old personality.
Some days Candace felt so bad that she didn’t want to get out of bed, but she got up anyway and meditated. She told herself that whenever she transmuted those lower emotions into elevated emotions, she was removing herself biologically from her past and priming her brain and body to a new future. She began to realize how worthwhile doing her inner work was, and it soon became less like effort and more like a gift.
Thanks to her daily persistence, Candace noticed a huge shift very quickly, and she started feeling better. She started communicating with others differently once she stopped looking at the world through a mind of fear and frustration, and instead looked through a lens of compassion, love, and gratitude. Her energy increased, and she was able to think more clearly.
Candace realized that she didn’t react the same way to the familiar conditions in her life, because the old fear-based emotions were no longer within her body. She was overcoming her knee-jerk reactions, because she now saw that the people and conditions that used to upset her existed only in relation to how she was feeling. She was becoming free.
Part of her process of change included becoming conscious of the unconscious thoughts that typically slipped by her awareness during the day. In her meditations, she became determined that those thoughts would never go unnoticed again. Under no circumstances would she allow herself to return to the behaviors and habits connected to her old self. She erased the chalkboard biologically, neurologically, and genetically, making room to create a new self, and her body began to liberate energy. In other words, she was going from particle to wave by releasing the stored emotions as energy in her body. Her body was no longer living the past.
With this newly available energy that she’d freed up, Candace began to see the landscape of a new future. She asked herself, How do I want to behave? How do I want to feel? How do I want to think? By getting up every day for months on end in a state of gratitude, she was emotionally instructing her body that her new future had already arrived, which signaled new genes in new ways, moving her body back into homeostasis. Right on the other side of Candace’s anger, she found compassion. Right on the other side of her frustration, she discovered patience and gratitude. And right on the other side of her victimization was a creator, waiting to create joy and wellness. It was the same intense energy on either side, but she was now able to liberate it as she moved from particle to wave, from survival to creation.
Sweet, Sweet Success
When Candace returned to her doctor seven months after her diagnosis, he was amazed by the change in his patient. Her blood tests had come back perfect. In her initial round of tests in February 2011, her thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) had been 3.61 (which is high), and her antibody count had been 638 (showing a major imbalance). But by September 2011, Candace’s TSH had dropped to a normal 1.15, and her antibody count was a healthy 450, even though she was no longer taking any medication. She’d healed herself in less than one year.
The doctor wanted to know just what she’d been doing to get these great results. It seemed almost too good to be true. Candace explained that she knew she’d created this condition, so she’d decided to conduct an experiment on herself to uncreate it. She told the doctor that by meditating daily and maintaining an elevated state of emotion, she had been epigenetically signaling new genes instead of letting unhealthy emotions continue to signal the old genes. She explained that she’d worked regularly on who she wanted to become and that she’d stopped responding to everything in her external environment like an animal in survival mode: fighting, fleeing, kicking, or screaming. Everything around her was basically the same; she was just responding in a way that was more loving to herself.
The doctor told her, looking absolutely amazed, “I wish all my patients were like you, Candace. It’s just incredible to hear your story.”
Candace doesn’t really know how her healing happened. She doesn’t need to. She just knows that she has become someone else.
I had dinner with Candace a while after all this happened, at a point when she had been off her medication for months and had no symptoms at all. Her health was fantastic, all her hair had grown back, and she felt great about herself. She mentioned over and over again that she was so in love with her present life.
I told her, laughing, “You’re in love with life, and it’s loving you back. You should be in love with your life—you created it every day for months that way!”
Candace explained that she just trusted in an infinite field of potentials and knew that something else was going on beyond her that had helped her heal. All she really had to do was to get beyond herself and enter into the autonomic nervous system, and then keep planting the seeds for a new life. And without knowing how it happened, it just happened—and when it did, she felt better than she’d ever felt before.
Candace’s life is now completely different from her life when she was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. She’s a business partner in a personal development program that teaches self-development work, and she also maintains a corporate job. She has a loving relationship, new friendships, and new business opportunities. A new personality ultimately creates a new personal reality.
A state of being is a magnetic force that draws events equal to that state of being, so when Candace fell in love with herself, she drew a loving relationship to herself. Because she felt worthy and felt respect for herself and all of life, conditions began to show up for her in which she had opportunities to contribute, to be respected, and to make a difference in the world. And of course, when she moved into a new personality, the old personality became like another lifetime. That new physiology began to drive her to greater levels of joy and inspiration—and the disease then belonged to the old personality. She was someone else.
It’s not that she became addicted to joy; she was just no longer addicted to being unhappy. When she started experiencing greater levels of happiness, she found that there’s always more bliss, more joy, and more love to experience, because every experience creates a different blend of emotions. She started really wanting the challenges in her life so that she could find out to what extent she could take this information into transformation.
The ultimate lesson that Candace learned was that her disease and her challenges were never about someone else—they were always about her. In her old state of being, she’d had the firm belief that she was a victim of her relationship and of her external circumstances and that life was always happening to her. Becoming aware of this work and taking full responsibility for herself and her life—and realizing that what had happened never had anything to do with what was outside of her—was not only a huge empowerment, but also one of the greatest gifts Candace could’ve ever asked for.
Joann’s Story
Joann lived most of her life in the fast lane. The 59-year-old mother of five was also a committed wife, a successful businesswoman, and an entrepreneur who constantly juggled her home life, family dynamics, growing career, and thriving business. Although her goal was to stay sane, healthy, and balanced, she couldn’t imagine her life any other way than intense, fast paced, and busy; she was living on the edge and proving to everyone that her mind was active and sharp. Joann constantly pushed herself to take on as much as possible, all the while maintaining exceptionally high standards. She was a leader, admired by many and regularly sought out for advice. Her peers called her “Superwoman,” and she was—or so she thought.
All that ended abruptly in January 2008, when Joann stepped off the elevator in her apartment building and then just collapsed, about 50 feet from her front door. She hadn’t felt well that day, so she’d gone to a walk-in clinic for help and been on her way back home. In a matter of moments, everything in her world had changed, and she found herself clinging to life.
After eight months of testing, the doctors diagnosed her with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (SPMS), an advanced stage of multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic disease in which the immune system attacks the central nervous system. Symptoms vary widely depending on the individual, but can start with conditions such as numbness in a leg or an arm, progressing as far as paralysis and even blindness. These symptoms can include not only physical but also cognitive and psychiatric problems.
Joann’s symptoms had been so vague and sporadic over the previous 14 years that she’d easily brushed them off as by-products of a hectic lifestyle. But now her condition had a label, and it felt like a life sentence—with no chance of parole. She found herself thrown into the depths of the Western medical world, challenged by its strong belief that MS is a permanent disease.
A few years before the diagnosis, Joann had put the family business in Calgary on hold and made a life-changing move to Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada, something her family had wanted to do for years. After the move, Joann struggled with one challenge after another as the family’s eroding finances and resources put them in a very precarious situation. Joann’s self-esteem, confidence, and health all took a nosedive. Once she found herself unable to become greater than her environment, her mental and physical state began to decline. Money became tighter and tighter as other stressors began to increase. Soon, the family couldn’t even meet their basic needs of food and shelter. In early 2007, the woman everyone else had always seen as Superwoman hit bottom, and before the end of the year, the family returned to Calgary.
MS is an inflammatory disease in which the insulating coverings of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord are damaged, along with the nerve fibers themselves. The condition disrupts the nervous system from communicating and sending signals to various parts of the body. The type of MS Joann developed is a progressive type that builds up over time, often causing permanent neurological problems, especially as the disease advances. Her doctors told her it was incurable.
Initially, Joann was determined that her MS wouldn’t define her. Yet she quickly spiraled downward into physical disability and cognitive decline. Joann had to depend on others for basic care as her limitations increased. Because of her sensory and motor problems, she began to rely on crutches, walkers, and a wheelchair. Eventually she had to rely on a mobility scooter to get around.
It wasn’t much of a surprise that she crashed when her life did. Joann’s body finally did her the favor she wouldn’t do herself—that is, to stop and say, “No more!” She’d pushed herself too hard. Even though she’d achieved success in her early years, deep down inside, she felt like a failure most of the time because she constantly judged herself and thought that she could always do a better job. She was never satisfied. Whatever she did or achieved was never good enough.
Most important, Joann didn’t want to stop doing, because then she would have to attend to that impending feeling of failure. So instead, she stayed busy by putting all of her attention on her outer world—various experiences with people and things at different times and places—so that she wouldn’t have to put any attention on her inner world of thoughts and feelings.
The majority of Joann’s life had been filled with supporting others, by celebrating their successes and encouraging them, yet she’d never allowed anyone to see what wasn’t working in her own life. She hid her pain from everyone. Joann constantly gave but never received—because she never allowed herself to receive—so she’d spent a lifetime denying herself her own personal evolution by never expressing herself. It makes sense that when Joann tried to change her inner world by using the conditions in her outer world, she would inevitably manifest only failure.
When she finally collapsed, Joann was so weak and defeated that she barely had the strength to fight for her life. All that time spent living in emergency mode, constantly reacting to the conditions in her external world, had robbed Joann of her life force, draining all the energy from her internal world—the place for repair and healing. She was simply tapped out.
Joann Changes Her Mind
The one thing Joann knew without a doubt was that the damage that the MRIs showed was riddling her brain and spinal column hadn’t appeared overnight. Her body had slowly been eaten away at her core—the central nervous system. After all those years of ignoring symptoms, she’d become unnerved because she was afraid to look inside herself. Those daily toxic chemicals were repeatedly knocking on the door of her cells, and finally the gene for the disease answered the door and switched on.
Bedridden, Joann made her first goal to slow down the progression of the MS in her body. She knew from reading my first book that the brain doesn’t know the difference between what she could make real internally by thought alone and the real external experience, and she knew that mental practice could change her brain and her body. She started mentally rehearsing doing yoga, and after just a few weeks of daily practice, she was able to do some actual physical poses—even some standing ones. These results highly motivated her.
Every day, Joann primed her brain and body by thought alone. Just like the piano players in Chapter 5 who mentally rehearsed playing the piano and grew the same neurological circuits as the subjects who physically practiced the exercises, Joann was installing the circuits in her brain to look as if she were already physically walking and moving. Remember the subjects in the various weight-lifting studies who increased their strength just by mentally practicing lifting weights or flexing their biceps? Just like them, Joann knew she could make her body look as if the experience of healing had already started to happen—by literally changing her mind.
Soon she was able to stand briefly, and then she could walk with support. Joann was quite wobbly and otherwise still dependent on a mobility scooter, but at least she was no longer confined to bed and feeling sorry for herself. She had turned a corner.
When Joann began to meditate regularly to simply quiet her mind chatter, she became aware of how sad and angry she really was. The floodgates opened. Joann realized she felt weak, isolated, rejected, and unworthy most of the time. Out of balance, ungrounded, and disconnected, she felt as though she’d lost a vital part of herself. She observed how she denied herself by pleasing others and how she couldn’t acknowledge herself without feeling guilty. She recognized that she was always trying to control what seemed to be a spiraling chaos around her, yet it never worked. On a deeper level, she had known this all along but had chosen to ignore it, pushing herself relentlessly and pretending that everything was okay.
Painful as it was, Joann was now looking at how she’d created her disease. She decided to become conscious of all of those subconscious thoughts, actions, and emotions that were defining her as the same personality who’d created this particular personal reality. She knew that once she could look at who she was being, it meant that she’d be able to change those aspects of herself. The more she became conscious of her unconscious self and aware of her state of being, the more she gained dominion over what she’d hidden from view.
By early 2010, Joann felt that the progression of the MS had indeed slowed. Her goal then became to stop it altogether. In May, when she mentioned this idea to a neurologist who asked what her goals were with her disease, the doctor abruptly terminated her appointment. Instead of becoming discouraged, Joann was more intent after this incident.
Taking Her Healing to the Next Level
When Joann attended a workshop in Vancouver, she couldn’t walk on her own. During the weekend, I asked the participants to set a firm intention in their minds and combine it with an elevated emotion in their bodies. The goal was to recondition the body to a new mind, instead of continuing to condition it with survival emotions. I wanted participants to open their hearts and teach their bodies emotionally what their future would feel like. This was the missing ingredient to Joann’s daily mental practice. Embracing thoughts of walking across a 20- to 25-foot floor with only her cane for support excited her beyond belief. She was now adding the second element of the placebo effect to the equation: expectation with emotion.
It was this combination—convincing her body emotionally that the future event of healing was happening to her in the present moment—that would take Joann to the next level. Her body, as the unconscious mind, had to believe it for it to be so. If she were to embrace the joy of being well and give thanks before the healing occurred, then her body would be getting a sampling of her future in the present moment.
I suggested to Joann that she really pay attention to her thoughts, because it was her thoughts that had truly made her sick. I pressed her to get beyond the personality that was connected to her condition, which was necessary before she could create a new personality and a new personal reality. Now she could apply meaning and intention to what she was doing.
Two months after that workshop, Joann attended a second, more advanced workshop in Seattle. Her scooter had broken down the day before she left for that event, so she used her motorized wheelchair to get around. Despite initially feeling more vulnerable because of that, at the workshop, Joann soon felt better able to move. Her associative memory related to the positive experience of the last event, and the expectation of getting better in the current event, was what initiated that process. If 29 percent of chemo patients can experience anticipatory nausea before their chemo treatments (as you read in Chapter 1), then maybe it’s possible for some of the workshop participants to experience anticipatory wellness when they’re back in the workshop setting. Whatever the trigger, Joann saw a new possibility and, with enthusiasm, began once again to emotionally embrace that future in the present moment.
During the last meditation of that workshop, the magic happened for her. Joann experienced a huge internal shift, and she felt something that moved her profoundly. She felt her body changing automatically, once she entered her autonomic nervous system and it received the new instructions and took over. She felt lifted, overjoyed, and free. After the meditation, Joann got up from her chair a different person than she’d been when she’d sat down—she was in a new state of being. She then walked to the front of the room—without any support, not even her cane. She strutted across the room wide-eyed, laughing like a child. She could feel and move her legs, which had been dormant for years.
She’d gotten out of the way—and it felt incredible! To my amazement, Joann had signaled new genes in new ways right during that one meditation. She’d actually changed her condition in just one hour!
When she got beyond her MS identity, she became a different person, and that’s when she stopped trying to slow, stop, or reverse her MS. She no longer tried to prove anything to herself, her family, her doctors, or anyone else. She understood and experienced for the first time that her true journey was always about wholeness, which is what verifiable healing is always about. She forgot that she had an official disease, and she dissociated from that identity for a moment. The freedom that doing so engendered and the amplitude of that elevated emotion were strong enough to switch on a new gene. Joann knew that MS was simply a label, like “mother,” “wife,” or “boss.” She had changed that label by simply giving up her past.
More Miracles
When Joann arrived back home three days later, unbeknownst to her, the miraculous continued to unfold. While doing yoga, a practice she’d begun physically—not just mentally—after attending the second workshop, she noticed that she could lift one foot off the ground. She tried to lift the other—success! She then noticed that she could flex her feet for the first time in years. And she could wiggle her toes, which she hadn’t done in a long time.
She was stunned and in absolute awe as tears of joy flowed from her eyes. She knew in that instant that anything was possible, not because of some external medication or procedure, but because of the internal changes she’d made. Joann knew she could be her own placebo.
Within a very short time, Joann taught herself how to walk again. Two years later, she is still walking unassisted and is more playful and full of life. Her body strength has improved, and she’s now able to do many things that she thought she’d never again be able to do. Most important, she feels alive and filled with boundless joy. Joann feels whole, and because she can now receive, she continues to receive healing.
Joann recently told me, “My life is magical, full of incredible synergies, abundance, and unexpected gifts of every sort. It bubbles, sparkles, and tingles with a new and lighter reflection of myself. It’s the new me—actually, the real me that I’d tried to keep under control and hidden for most of my life!”
Joann now lives most of her day in gratitude. She still takes the time to be aware of her thoughts and feelings; that is, she cultivates her state of being every day, paying attention to what she tells herself and what she thinks about others, too. In her meditations, she observes herself and becomes familiar with how she acts. Very rarely does a thought get past her conscious mind that she doesn’t want to experience.
Joann’s current neurologist supports her choices and has been astounded by what she has seen. Her physician has had to acknowledge the power of the mind, which Joann demonstrated right before her eyes with medical reports and blood tests that show no signs of MS.
Laurie, Candace, and Joann accomplished their dramatic remissions using no resources outside of themselves. They changed their health from the inside out—without the use of medication, surgery, therapy, or anything other than their own minds. They became their own placebos.
Now, let’s take a scientific look into the brains of some other people from my workshops who were able to make similar dramatic changes so that we can see exactly what was going on in the process of these remarkable transformations.
