Signs and Wonders: Finding Peace, Joy, and Direction from Coincidences, Synchronicities, and Angel Murmurs--and Other Ways God Speaks

by Albert Clayton Gaulden

Overview

Have you ever ignored a coincidence and wished you hadn't?
Have you ever disregarded a hunch that was later proved as fact?
Have you ever had a dream...and watched it come true?
If prayer is about talking to God,
Signs and Wonders is about listening for God's answers.
Albert Clayton Gaulden, founder and director of the Sedona Intensive, believes that God speaks to us personally in a language that is rich in symbol and coincidence, offering messages and guidance we can put to use every day to solve our problems and gain peace, joy, and direction. In Signs and Wonders, Gaulden teaches us how to open ourselves up to the language of God, and open ourselves to a more meaningful life.
How can we listen to God? How can God help us to understand the answers to our prayers? How can we learn to ward off worry, fear, doubt, and despair? Signs and Wonders contains practical strategies, anecdotes, case studies, and stories of personal transformation that can help us to clear God's channel — the way we listen — and master a new form of communication. For when we learn to be receptive to God's language, we can begin to benefit from its grace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743237932
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	11/18/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Albert Clayton Gaulden, founder and director of Sedona, Arizona's popular alternative therapy program, the Sedona Intensive, is also the author of Clearing for the Millennium and Signs and Wonders. The Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC World News, and publications such as the Chicago Tribune have featured Albert Clayton Gaulden and his transforming work. Visit his website at www.sedonaintensive.com.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 3: When Things Fall Apart

I will never forget my first taste of alcohol.

It was l957. I had dropped out of college in an attempt to put some money in the bank and was working as a messenger with a law firm in Birmingham. Assigned to deliver legal documents, I made my way across town to the Tutwiler Hotel on a scorching-hot day with a package marked "urgent."

"Darling," the client purred as the door to her opulent suite swung open. "Come in. Come in. In that little envelope you are carrying the key to my prison cell."

Though temporarily blinded by the sun streaming through the large French windows, I could not help but notice that the dishwater blonde standing before me was an exotic woman with crushed ruby lips. She was wearing a flamboyant red peignoir and a lot of gold jewelry. She thrust a cold martini glass into my hand.

"Cheers," she said, clinking her glass against mine.

Until that moment, alcohol had never touched my lips. I grew up Baptist Christian in the Deep South in the 1940s and 1950s and had walked a path of born-again living and Bible study. I emerged at age twenty-one a rather self-righteous party-pooper. After my beloved Blanche had retired, my devotion had shifted to a new friend named Jesus. I foreswore alcohol in His name. I vowed never to tip a glass and had kept to my word.

Now I was draining the last drops of the forbidden fruit and asking for more. For the next twenty years, I couldn't get enough. No matter how many times I reached for a bottle, I heard a voice echoing in my head, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You'll never amount to anything. When are you going to straighten up and fly right?"

It was Momma's voice. She had divorced Daddy when I was nine years old. Although I like to think that she did so because he was abusive to his children, I suspect she had reasons of her own for ending the marriage. Life in our house was hard, with little income and many mouths to feed. Mother worked every day as a secretary and her hard life left her bitter, with precious little emotion to shower on my brothers and sisters and me. Not once do I remember Momma telling us that she loved us or that she was proud of anything we did. As far back as I can recall, each of us was an island, separate and starving for some encouragement.

I sought refuge in the happy endings of double features at the movies and got lifted higher than a kite on music played in church and on the radio. A chorus of the stir-'em-up gospel standard "Nearer My God to Thee" could rouse me to my feet much the same as a pop-chart hit like "Earth Angel." Art also lifted me up. When our elementary school class visited the museum, I would practically walk into the large splashy paintings on display.

Looking back, I believe my sensitivity was leading me into a life of escape, which was taking shape in my mind, where I would play make-believe games. When I was a small child, for instance, I began assigning gender designations to colors and numbers, deciding that red was male and yellow was female, while four and five were boys and three was a girl. I believed in Santa Claus longer than most kids and hoped that a guardian angel would rescue me from the horrors of real life. These horrors included my father's behavior, my family's poverty, and especially my clubfeet.

The period from 1957 until 1979 is something of a blur for me. Moving from Birmingham to New York, Atlanta to Mobile, Mobile to California, I never felt connected to anything. I never kept a job for very long. I worked in advertising, sold real estate and ladies ready-to-wear. By 1979, I was dead broke, unemployable, and living in a postage stamp­size apartment in Long Beach, California, driving a beat-up old clunker. In the quiet of my mind, I would sometimes drift back to the idyllic days I spent in church memorizing the scriptures. One verse often reverberated in my head. "What does the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?"

"Who was God, anyway?" I wondered. Little did I know at the time, it was only when I hit bottom and was ready to confront my alcoholism some months later that I began to hear that voice.

Copyright © 2003 by Albert Clayton Gaulden

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

PART I:

LISTENING FOR THE VOICE

1. What Do You See? What Do You Hear? What Do You Feel?

2. Blanche and the Angels

3. When Things Fall Apart

4. Turning Up the Volume

5. Forgiveness Is the Path to Clearing

6. Through the Looking Glass

7. Starting Over

PART II:

BREAKING THROUGH TO THE NEW LANGUAGE

8. Defining the New Language

9. Learning to Speak the New Language

10. The Language of Coincidence

11. The Language of Synchronicity

12. The Language of Signs and Wonders

13. The Language of God-by-Proxy

14. The Language of Dreams

15. Confirming What You Hear

16. Questions Worth Asking

17. What It Means to Pray

18. Thy Will Be Done

PART III:

IMPROVING YOUR RECEPTION OF THE NEW LANGUAGE

19. Now It's Your Turn to Still the Mind and Meditate

20. Deflating Ego

21. Your Family as Mirror

22. Remembering Who You Really Are

23. Practicing Forgiveness

PART IV:

THE POWER AND PROMISE OF THE NEW LANGUAGE

24. You, the Tuning Fork

25. Change You and Change the World

26. The Dawning Age of Miracles

27. Let the Power Pass

PART V:

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT THE NEW LANGUAGE

28. Exploring the New Language

PART VI:

RESOURCES

About the Sedona Intensive

Have You Experienced the New Language?

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

James Redfield Author of The Celestine Prophecy A brilliant survey of the many ways divine guidance moves in our lives.

From the Publisher

The core message of this book is a simple and valuable one: if we make ourselves receptive and stop to listen, we will find that God speaks to us in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, Gaulden, founder and director of the Sedona Intensive (a treatment center for people struggling with compulsions and addictions), takes almost 300 pages to belabor what could have been said in about a third the space. He calls these non-verbal communications from God "the new language" (although what is "new" about it is unclear, since he claims that Noah and Moses understood it), and lists 25 examples from angel murmurs and coincidence to intuition and visions. Each definition is accompanied by real-life examples gathered from Gaulden's clients over the years. The stories are often the most engaging parts of the book, but they can also be the most confusing. For example, although Gaulden manages to formally define the subtle differences between "coincidence," "serendipity" and "synchronicity," or between "hunch," "intuition," "inner knowing" and "thought impression," his narrative illustrations seem to blur the terms together. The final third of the book purports to improve readers' reception of the new language, but reads like a self-help manual bogged down in lists and bullet points. It is also full of oblique advertising for Gaulden's Sedona program. Gaulden's thesis may help many readers increase their spiritual sensitivity, but the book has a high chaff-to-wheat ratio along the way. (Jan. 8) Forecast: Gaulden is a well-connected author; the endorsement from James Redfield, author of the bestseller The Celestine Prophecy, will certainly help move the book. It's being launched with a seven-city author tour of the Western U.S. and a first print run of 35,000 copies. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly