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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781982202682 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 05/10/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 110 |
| File size: | 131 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
All You Need Is Love
WELCOME ABOARD
A new consciousness is arising on our planet and with it a movement towards love. We live in exciting times! There is scientific proof that our hearts are stronger than our brains and that our emotionally charged thoughts create our lives. To access this power, we have to find a way to step out of the physical, emotional, and mental stress of life and connect to love. We can do this by becoming conscious of our blocks to love, and with meditation. This book will show you how, and by guiding you step-by-step, you will become a beacon of love.
To begin your Love Revolution, I am asking you to commit to being kind to yourself and to love yourself - no matter what. Only then can you unchain your heart and walk in love. The Love Revolution is a sacred journey, as we walk in the light of divine Source/God force energy. This process, therefore, meant to be taken lightly.
At times, it won't be easy, but it won't be boring. It will be an intrepid journey that has the potential to be life-changing. Every day will be different. Some days on your travels, you may find heaven on earth, and some days you will feel like you are in hell. Some days will be full of busyness, and some days will be divinely blank. Some days will be uncomfortable, and some days will be bliss. Some days you will lose time and sit in meditation longer than you thought possible. And some days you will wiggle and jiggle for what feels like an eternity but find it was only ten minutes. It is all part of the journey.
You will need to be openhearted as you review, and reset your habitual thought patterns. There will be days when you find yourself sitting in the shadows, as love brings up to the light everything that is unlike itself. Your hidden stuff will surface. Fantastic! Be aware that this may throw you off balance and you may trip. It is all part of the journey. Take a deep breath, and forgive yourself for the fall.
Treat yourself kindly when the journey appears difficult, even though your natural instinct will be to give yourself a hard time. These tricky times are when you must give yourself more love, not less. Trust yourself, and have faith that you can do it. I know you can do it. I believe in your full potential, and it is this part of you that I write.
Feel free to take some, if not all, of the words in these pages for yourself. Some of the words will resonate immediately, and some may take a little longer. If you are curious, read the book through and then go back to the beginning to start the Love Revolution meditation. I recommend you take one chapter on board a week, and then practice, practice, practice. The first week isn't a sit-down meditation; it's two exercises to ready you for the weeks ahead. A simple statement and a breathing exercise. Do not race through the steps. A strong foundation leads to a strong structure, and a strong structure leads to a strong revolution.
Use this book as a study guide, take a highlighter (or a pen) to these pages, and make these words, and this book your own. Be creative. Add notes and circle pieces that ring true. Own it!
You may want to encourage friends to get a copy of this book for themselves so they can go on this journey with you. Or you could organize a group to meditate, discuss, and support each other. It is a fabulous idea to share your journey as it helps ground it. You could even start your own neighborhood Love Revolution!
However you choose to make this journey, alone or with travel buddies, the first step is always the hardest. You have to make some decisions. You have to decide to gift yourself a few minutes every day, over the next month, to the Love Revolution. You have to decide to open yourself to love, and you have to decide to receive it. You have to decide that there is no one on the planet more deserving of your love than you.
"I LOVE MYSELF!"
Generally, we are hard on ourselves. We hold high expectations, or none at all, and judge ourselves harshly. We are our own worst critics. We criticize ourselves in the mirror, and we doubt our ability to succeed.
To tune yourself into love, I want you to take on board a short statement to say silently, and out loud whenever you can. I am asking you to repeat it frequently until it becomes automatic. At first, it may seem difficult, and in fact darn right silly, to be saying this to yourself. If you stick with it for the month it will take to read and practice the Love Revolution; you will be forever changed. I promise!
The magic words are "I love myself!"
Make this the mantra that you repeat regularly, out loud and internally, until it becomes a new belief. Your subconscious mind listens to and believes wholeheartedly everything you think and say, so be aware of what you are saying about yourself because you are always listening.
When you state, "I love myself!" new neural pathways will be created in your brain so that you will love yourself. Once you believe it, every cell in your body will hear it, and they will believe it too. You will glow with love and be lovely to behold. Your love will radiate out into the world, and you will see proof of your belief as the world shows you how it loves you back. Your life will become a manifestation of love.
Be warned that you will find inevitable resistance to your new notion. You have spent years telling yourself how unlovable you are. You may not know what it means to be loved. You may not believe you deserve love.
Keep practicing; say it anyway. It may feel odd in the beginning, but you will get used to it. If you find your mind arguing with you, to prove how unlovable you are, spend the first week repeating "I love myself for practicing to love myself!" Don't you love that?
Loving yourself is a total win/win. By loving yourself, you will feel self-confidence and inner peace, meaning you are not relying on others to support you emotionally. You will become self-sufficient and overflow in love, which will feed the field of consciousness around you. It is so incredibly empowering to be full to overflowing with love. It's the highest vibration in existence. It is enlightened.
To be enlightened means to find the light within. Self-love is the true definition of enlightenment. To love you, with all of your flaws, and without judgment or expectation is the key. To accept and appreciate the dramas and traumas you have lived as being necessary steps on your path to being your true self.
I imagine we are all like pearls that grow more beautiful every year by rolling around in the daily grit, within our oyster shells. Right now, the world is your oyster and you, my friend, are the pearl.
Self-love enables you to make healthier choices for your body, mind, and soul. When you love yourself and make decisions from that vibration, you are inviting amazing experiences into your life; you begin to greet your full potential. You are on a path of fulfillment and will be an inspiration to many who will see you glow with new confidence and self-awareness. You will overflow with love and be a pure expression of divine Source/ God force energy.
Love is creative, healthy, and abundant. It is expansive and expressive energy. Tune yourself in like a radio to love. Start by doing loving things for yourself, and then go out and do loving things for others. Be the light in your world. Watch as your stress levels decrease. Then you will begin to release layers of mental and emotional trash, which is energetic clutter. Buried under all that clutter is only love.
Some people around you will think you are a little crazy to be declaring your love for self. Self-love has always been considered selfish and egotistical. We are taught to care for others before ourselves and to be humble. All this does is martyr us and limit our possibilities.
What if we become self-full, not selfish, and encourage others to be self-full too? From this space of power, we are aligned with the universe and living an inspired life. We stop seeking love in all the wrong places and begin to embody love. We become love.
True self-love is not arrogance or putting yourself first. It is not about always looking after number one and having things go your way. It is not a comparison to others, and wondering if you are better than them, or if they are better than you. It is not criticizing those around you, or yourself.
Self-love is about being brave enough to clean out the stuff hidden in the dark, and to love yourself while you do. To self- soothe your Shadow Self with self-love, which allows you to be more available to love others around you. You will be of higher service to all.
The more you love yourself, the more beneficial you are to humanity. Loving ourselves is being on the Love Revolution and marching toward healthy, happy, and whole. Stop and imagine a world full of radiant love revolutionaries humbly practicing meditation and consciously setting their vibration. They fill themselves up with love and radiate love to their families, their communities, their countries, and the planet.
If you decide - and the decision is yours - to find balance and order within your body and your life, you will find it by being part of the Love Revolution. Decide is the power word. A decision carries your intention outward to the universe and inward to your soul.
The first step is to look at your stress responses, so you can control and learn to over-ride them.
FIGHT & FLIGHT
We carry fear in our DNA, every animal does. In the good old/bad old days, we had precarious lives and had to protect and defend ourselves constantly. We are still the same physical beings our ancient ancestors were, even though the world we live in has changed dramatically.
Our ancestors had the stress response, fight/f light, as a lifesaving switch. This switch turns off unnecessary systems in an emergency, like the immune and digestive, and directs the energy instead to the heart, lungs, limbs, and our senses. This switch floods us with chemicals to make us stronger and faster. We become hyper-alert and poised for action, to either fight or run. We are wired for survival 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
We no longer need to have this response to save ourselves from being eaten. But we do still have the lifesaving switch. We have fight/flight response constantly within our modern lives as we rush around feeling stressed by our lists of things to do. Rush, rush, rush! And all that rushing tells our brain that we are running from danger, and so we start pumping stress chemicals.
Stress can either be acute (short-term) or chronic (long-term). We are physically built to handle acute stress, fight/flight and then back to normal restore mode. Chronic stress is when short- term stress has become long-term, and our bodies no longer know how to turn fight/flight off. This chronic stress leads to inflammation in the body, the mind, and in the emotions.
Inflammation is a response to our environment. We commonly think of it as an allergic or toxic response. When we say we are allergic to something, we mean it is poisonous for us. Stress is an allergic reaction to life, and when we have that reaction chronically, stress becomes our everyday reality. We live life in inflammation.
Immune cells get changed under chronic stress and become ready to take on any infection or repair any damage. Unfortunately, they are fired up and ready even when there is nothing to fight. These cells cause inflammation in the body and inflammation causes disease.
Chronic stress in the mind leads to anxiety and insomnia. Stressful thoughts keep looping round and round, tying us up in mental knots. Chronic stress of the emotions gives us an inflamed ego stuck in fear, which makes us anxious and irritable, depressed and with very short fuses, making us overly reactive.
Stress in our modern lives is a perception. It is how we think about our lives that cause stress reactions within our body. We give ourselves stress, nothing else does, even though it is difficult for us to remain detached from outside influences. Look around. People are overreacting to their daily lives; they are attempting to outrun their imagined predators. No one can switch the stress off.
The fight/f light response is an electrical impulse, which is released to charge us up. If we don't express this with fight or flight, this electrical charge causes havoc to our body as stress. Recently there has been acknowledged a third response called 'freeze,' which is the paralyzing terror felt when we realize we can't outfight or outrun our predator. Within that moment the body freezes and is unable to express the emotional and physical release of the fight/flight process.
When we find ourselves in this situation, our body is pumping the chemicals, but we are internalizing all of the responses, like a deer in the headlights. The frozen emotion gets stuck in our mind and our body. Instead of us feeling the emotion and moving through and out of it, it gets stored it in our cells. Emotions are not supposed to be internalized. They are supposed to be experienced, accepted, and then released.
These unexpressed moments can replay throughout our life. All it takes is for some situation to remind us somehow of a trauma we have suffered in our past, and we are triggered. The original fear of that memory resurfaces and plays out in the 'here and now.'
Experts are just beginning to understand the effects of trauma on our systems and our lives, and therefore our families and communities. This understanding becomes more profound when you realize that trauma a grandparent suffered affects their parenting and therefore their children, which goes on to affect the children's parenting and therefore their children, and so on. This pattern is called intergenerational trauma, and all families experience it.
Our parents did the best they could do, with whatever fears, dramas, and traumas they had running. Just like them, we do the best we can.
Trauma can be felt at the loss of a loved one, betrayal, accidents, abuse, violence or being bullied, for example. Some indicating behaviors of fight/flight/freeze response playing out in your life could be as follows.
Fight = anger, rage, nausea, a tight jaw, grinding teeth and a need to argue. Flight = anxiety, excessive energy, restlessness, and tension in the body. Freeze = dread, breath holding, numbness to life, feeling trapped.
No wonder we are all feeling stressed. And this is ordinary! On the Love Revolution, we are leaving ordinary behind, and moving towards extraordinary. You are going to embrace the fear and love yourself anyway. Let's march forward and start to look at emotions.
EMOTIONS
Emotions are energy in motion. E-motion. They are waves of energy moving through us, causing physical and mental responses. And our feelings are expressions of those waves of emotional energy. Because emotions are biochemistry, they can be overridden and reprogrammed. Inflamed emotions do not need to lead to a breakdown; we can use them for a conscious breakthrough. When you are aware that an emotion isn't working for you, there is an opportunity to choose a new emotion, like love, and change your chemistry.
Negative emotions are an invitation to grow up, to grow out and expand. You want to embrace all chances to transmute what presents itself. You are detoxing your emotions. Better out than in! Feel grateful that you have an opportunity to clean up your vibration. And as soon as possible, take yourself away, even if it is by stomping, and find somewhere to sit quietly. Place your hand on your heart, and say, "It is OK. I love you."
You can fake an emotional state to switch your physical state. You can 'fake it until you make it.' Emotions create change within your body faster than anything else. By allowing your brain time to rewire means you will have a period where you know one thing, but you are still reacting to another. It can be tricky at times. When you are triggered, you may not be able to stop your emotional reaction. Things may be negative ... that is OK. You are practicing. It's all good! It's all very good!
I am not asking you to ignore negative emotions. I am asking you to feel into them and to love yourself anyway. When you are feeling negative, it is easy to give yourself a hard time, but this is when you need some loving. Love is the only way. State to yourself and the Universe, "I love myself even though I feel ..."
Loving yourself is having the courage to feel your emotions without judging or criticizing them. It's holding space for yourself when you are feeling sad, angry or lonely with the utmost love and respect. So, greet and welcome your negative emotions, your anger, your grief, and your shame. Own them, so they don't own you.
We are all one in the Universe. We are all connected. We are all a part of the cosmic ocean that energetically surrounds us. The Universe is within us, and we are within the Universe. This simple truth means that we cannot possibly experience pure love without first loving ourselves. So start asking, "Who am I in this moment? Fearful or love full?" Learn your vibrational frequency and become responsible for the energy you bring with you into every situation.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Love Revolution"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Erin Lewis.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction, ix,
Chapter 1 All You Need Is Love, 1,
Chapter 2 Ground Yourself In Love, 23,
Chapter 3 Crown Yourself In Love, 45,
Chapter 4 Express Yourself In Love, 67,
Chapter 5 Surrender Yourself In Love, 89,
Final Note, 97,
Complete Practise, 98,