course in miracles - Elevated Existence

Each month, a ton of new spiritual and self-help books hit the market. It’s easy to get overwhelmed or miss out on some new releases.

I created Elevated Existence Monthly Book Picks to help narrow down your search, and make sure you don’t miss some great options!

Here are the picks for March 2018. They are listed below in alphabetical order. Click on each title to go directly to Amazon and find out more about the book.

“Dodging Energy Vampires: An Empath’s Guide to Evading Relationships that Drain You and Restoring Your Health and Power,” by Christiane Northrup, M.D.
In Dodging Energy Vampires, Christiane Northrup, M.D., draws on the latest research, along with stories from her global community and her own life, to explore the phenomenon of energy vampires and show us how we can spot them, dodge their tactics, and take back our own energy. Readers will delve into the dynamics of vampire-empath relationships and discover how vampires use others’ energy to fuel their own dysfunctional lives. Once you recognize the patterns of behavior that mark these relationships, you’ll be empowered to identify the vampires in your life too. Dr. Northrup opens up a toolbox full of techniques to use so you can leave these harmful relationships behind; heal from the darkness they’ve cast over your mind, body, and spirit; and let your own light shine.

“Energy Strands: The Ultimate Guide to Clearing the Cords that are Constricting Your Life,” by Denise Linn
Discover the cables, ropes, ribbons, strands, threads, and filaments of energy that flow to and through you and learn ancient shamanic techniques to release the cords that bind you and empower the strands that strengthen and heal you from author Denise Linn. She also shares some of the methods she’s learned over the years to support you in finding harmony and balance in your life through understanding these lines of energy. Topics covered include attachments with family, ancestors, friends, lovers, crowds, and pets. The book also explores the connection between sound (crystal bowls), breath, meditation and visualization in strands. You will gain practical tools to clear negative cords from unhealthy attachments, toxic relationships and spaces.

“From Never Mind to Ever Mind: Transforming the Self to Embrace Miracles,” Robert Rosenthal, M.D.
When we don’t know what we want to create, we bounce from one desire to the next, in search of a better job, relationship, money and more. In his new book Robert Rosenthal M.D. shares an approach based on A Course in Miracles, explaining that only when we recognize and remove the obstacles to our true nature and the presence of love within us and within all beings, will we know the truth of who we are (and what we want). He takes readers on a journey of undoing, to demonstrate conclusively the false assumptions from which our current sense of self is constructed so we can gently release them and experience Spirit within. We don’t know what will make us happy, but our true self does, and will gladly reveal itself and show us the way if and when we allow it.

“The Gratitude Formula: A 7-Step Success System to Create a Life that You Love,” by May McCarthy
In The Gratitude Formula, May McCarthy offers a definable, practical system you can put to use every day to achieve success in your relationships, career, finances, health, personal pursuits, spiritual growth, and virtually any other aspect of your life. While her method is built upon starting each day with a grateful heart, the details of her 7-step practice, including the importance of implementing them on a daily basis, is the key to creating a life that you love.

You will learn how to create powerful, practical and achievable goals; develop your spiritual intuition to help you manifest and achieve your dreams; untangle from any doubts, fears or behaviors holding you back from abundance; and say yes to prosperity and limitless possibilities.

“The Mindful Day: Practical Ways to Find Focus, Calm and Joy From Morning to Evening,” by Laurie J. Cameron
Designed for busy professionals looking to integrate mindfulness into their daily lives, this guide draws on contemplative practice, modern neuroscience, and positive psychology to bring peace and focus to the home, in the workplace and beyond. Noted mindfulness expert and international teacher and business leader Laurie J. Cameron — a veteran of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being at George Mason, and 20-year mindfulness meditation practitioner — shows how to seamlessly weave mindfulness and compassion practices into your life. It includes straightforward exercises designed for busy schedules.

“Money, Manifestation & Miracles: A Guide to Transforming Women’s Relationship with Money,” by Meriflor Toneatto
When women are empowered with money, they become “difference makers,” transforming not only their own lives, but also those of their children, families and communities at large. Author Meriflor Toneatto, an award-winning leadership and coaching executive, shows how to extend your limits and create the life of your dreams — financially, spiritually and emotionally. She explains how money is “emotional currency” and prescribes eight Holistic Principles to overcome deep-seated blocks, “pay forward” your own successes, and live the life of your dreams.

“Permanent Marker: A Memoir,” by Aimee Ross
Aimee Ross was living a perfectly normal life raising three kids, married to her high school sweetheart, and teaching at her high school alma mater. Life was perfect right, until it wasn’t. Unhappy in her marriage, she asked for a divorce. Three days later, she suffered a heart attack at age forty-one. Five months after that, she survived a near-fatal car crash caused by an intoxicated driver. Her physical recovery took months and left her body marked by scars. The emotional recovery, though, would take longer, as Aimee sought to forgive the man who almost killed her and to forgive herself for tearing apart her family. This book will take readers on a journey of healing, proving light, new love and renewed purpose for life can come from darkness.

“Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength and Happiness,” by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
True resilience is much more than enduring terrible conditions. We need resilience every day to raise a family, work at a job, cope with stress, deal with health problems, navigate issues with others, heal from old pain, and simply keep on going. Blending neuroscience, mindfulness and positive psychology, New York Times bestselling author Dr. Rick Hanson shows readers how to develop 12 vital inner strengths hardwired into our nervous system. Then no matter what life throws at us, we will be able to feel less stressed, pursue opportunities with confidence, and stay calm and centered in the face of adversity. The book offers concrete suggestions, experiential practices, personal examples, and insights into the brain, and includes effective ways to interact with others and repair and deepen important relationships.

“This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide,” by Geneen Roth
With humor, compassion, and insight, This Messy Magnificent Life explores the personal beliefs, hidden traumas, and social pressures that shape not just women’s feelings about their bodies, but also their confidence, choices and relationships. Geneen Roth looks at the imperfect path women take to step into their own power, presence and ownership, and bases it on her own personal journey, and decades of work with thousands of women around the country.

Roth embraces everyone’s unique and often unsung potential and shows us how to be open, curious and kind with ourselves; how to say no to people and ideas that hold us back; how to let go of grudges and anxieties; how to pick ourselves up after setbacks; how to say a resounding yes to the world; how to move from fixing ourselves to finding ourselves; how to find joy in the ordinary; and how to experience the extraordinary right here and now in our bodies.

“We Consciousness: 33 Profound Truths for Inner and Outer Peace,” by Karen Noe
After best-selling author Dr. Wayne W. Dyer left the physical plane in 2015, psychic medium Karen Noé began receiving very profound and specific messages from him for his family — and for the world. While Wayne comes through to Karen singularly, he also comes through together with a group of other celestial beings called the We Guides, which includes Saint Francis of Assisi and countless other angels and ascended masters.

Wayne and the We Guides share 33 concepts that make up the We Consciousness — and they all point toward us becoming an instrument of peace. In order to extend peace outside of ourselves, we must first feel peace within ourselves. We must expect to see peace everywhere, and acknowledge the infinite peace that we are. Then we must live that identity to the fullest. After understanding and applying these ideas, readers will be able to create miracles in their life and the lives of others as well, and learn to create heaven on Earth.

“Your Holiness: Discover the Light Within,” by Debbie Ford
In a recently discovered unpublished work by the beloved spiritual teacher and #1 New York Times bestselling author, Debbie Ford, she reflects on the astonishing holiness that resides in each of us.

“What you are seeking at the deepest level exists inside of you, in the quietude of your own inner world, in the privacy of your own sweet heart. So now it’s your responsibility, your holy responsibility, to encode your consciousness with thoughts, feelings and images that will support you in creating the perfect internal environment to cultivate a deep and intimate relationship with the one you call God. This is the force that loves you, cheers for you and wants it all for you. In a world where love leaves as quickly as it comes, you can rest now, knowing that you have found a love that will never leave you, never misguide you and never ever let you down. My advice, dear friend, is take great care of that Love. It will give you everything you’ve been looking for.”

On the fifth anniversary of her death and written during her long battle with cancer, Your Holiness is a thoughtful and poignant exploration of the godliness that resides in all of us. Infused with her trademark frank honesty and keen insight, it is a blueprint for recognizing and accepting our latent spirituality. Debbie combines motivational prayers with deeply personal stories about her own spiritual journey — how she struggled and eventually found her internal faith — and translates her experience into a practical path for transformation.

By Gary Renard

One of the most important tenets of “A Course in Miracles” (ACIM), if you are actually interested in doing the Course, could be put in just four words: Don’t make it real.

More specifically, don’t make this illusion of a world or anything in it real in your mind because the world you see is your projection, which has no inherent reality. With the Course, you don’t forgive people because they really did something to you; you don’t forgive situations because they’re really happening; and you don’t forgive the events you see on the news because they are true. You forgive everything because nothing has really happened except in a dream of your own making; a script you authored and then forgot you made up. As the Course puts it, “We forgive our brother for what he hasn’t done.”

If ACIM is saying anything, it’s saying nothing has happened, and that “The full awareness of the Atonement is that the separation (from God) never occurred.” And because people haven’t really done anything, they are innocent. Few people like that idea at first, until an associated fact sinks in. And the truth of that statement doesn’t just mean other people are innocent. The most important thing is it must also mean that you are innocent. And you get in touch with your own innocence by seeing it everywhere.

The Secret to Salvation
Once in a while something will happen where I’m tempted to be upset. Maybe I’m on the Internet and I read someone saying something very nasty about me. Never mind that they never met me, don’t know me, and have no idea what they’re talking about. You would think, given the confidence with which they make their pronouncements, that they know everything about me. There are a lot of angry people out there, and the Internet is the perfect place for them to project their unconscious guilt onto others. Of course they don’t know that they’re projecting. They just think they’re right and their anger is justified. But as the Course would say to them, “Anger is never justified,” and “Attack has no foundation.” Indeed, the Course even gives us the secret to salvation: “You are doing this unto yourself.”

So, if I’m tempted to be upset, then I have to catch myself and stop. If I’m feeling upset I must be making it real. Why? Because if I wasn’t making it real then I wouldn’t be upset. The second that I remember the truth, the uncomfortableness goes away.

Every now and then I’ll get an e-mail with a complaint, or several complaints about something; my books are too absolute and uncompromising, my jokes are too smart assed, etc. Invariably, the e-mail concludes with the words, “I forgive you.” I write back to them saying, no, they haven’t forgiven me or their grievance. If they learned ACIM they’d know that the problem is, “You have made it real, and so you cannot forgive it.”

Practicing True Forgiveness
Not making it real is the smoothest short cut to practicing true forgiveness. Knowing there is a truth just beyond the illusory veil, a world unseen yet truly there, and that the world we see is a trick of the ego, makes it possible to get to the fact of the matter quickly instead of losing our peace. As a character once said in a movie, “The Matrix is an illusion to pull the wool over your eyes and stop you from seeing the real world.” Of course the movie didn’t go all the way and acknowledge God as the truth beyond the illusion, but hey, it’s a good start.

Thinking that people are bodies, and those bodies are real, is what the Course would call egocentricity. In a message to Helen Schucman, the scribe of the Course, Jesus was talking to her about always saying yes to people and not being able to say no. He brought up Edgar Cayce, who worked relentlessly and died younger than he should have, as an example of not being able to say no. Then Jesus made a very interesting statement, “If you cannot say no to the requests of others, you have not yet overcome egocentricity.”

If you can’t say no, then you’re saying to your own mind this is a real person, and they have a real problem, and this problem really has to be solved, and you’re the one who really has to solve it. And by extension you’re saying you are also a real body in a real world. You’re making the whole enchilada true. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t help people. But if you do, then you should do it after asking the Holy Spirit, if there is time. And don’t help them out of guilt or because you think you have to. Help them as an expression of love.

In the future, when the human race has a deeper understanding of quantum physics, recognizes the illusory nature of the universe more completely, and begins to understand the cause and process of projection, then the idea of forgiveness will make much more sense and be seen as the self-forgiving dynamic that it is. But you don’t have to wait for the world. You can end your suffering forever, in this lifetime. You can do this by recognizing that everyone you meet and everything in this world is a symbolic representation of that which is hidden in your own unconscious mind. And by forgiving what you see, you are forgiving yourself. Thus will your mind be healed through the activation of Spirit. And when it is completely healed you will have the peace of God and attain the state of enlightenment.

Forgiveness of everything and everyone you perceive, by not making it real and instead choosing the reality of Spirit, is necessary if you are to experience complete forgiveness for yourself. As “A Course in Miracles” asks you, “Can you to whom God says, ‘Release My Son!’ be tempted not to listen, when you learn that it is you for whom He asks release? And what but this is what this course would teach? And what but this is there for you to learn?”

ABOUT GARY RENARD
Gary Renard is the bestselling author of “The Disappearance of the Universe” trilogy, including “Your Immortal Reality,” and his latest, “Love Has Forgotten No One: The Answer to Life ” — all based on “A Course in Miracles.” As a teacher and worldwide speaker, Renard has taught “A Course in Miracles” in 24 countries and 43 states, appeared in seven documentary movies, won the Infinity Foundation Spirit Award, and hosts a monthly podcast. For more information, visit www.garyrenard.com.

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Elevated Existence March 2018 Spiritual Self-Help Book Picks

The Art of Not Making It Real