VIDEO: 4 Lessons from Louise Hay

Posted on by Tammy

Bestselling author and Hay House Founder, Louise Hay, passed away August 30, 2017, after touching the lives of millions around the world.

She leaves behind so many amazing teachings, along with the work done by her company Hay House and its many authors.

I interviewed Louise Hay in 2009, when I presented her with the first annual Elevated Existence Spiritual Service Award, and in this video, I share the 4 biggest lessons I learned from her in tribute to her life, and as a reminder to all of us on our spiritual path.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel here.

Learning Self Love: Louise Hay Mirror Work

Posted on by Tammy

For nearly 40 years, Louise Hay has been teaching others about healing, the power of affirmations and learning to love themselves. One of the modalities she is famous for is her mirror work.

In her newest book, “Mirror Work: 21 Days to Heal Your Life,” she walks readers through 21 exercise to heal their lives and help them tap into self love.

Each day, Hay presents a different theme, a Mirror Work Exercise, a Journaling Exercise and a Heart Thought to support the reader throughout the day. There is also a meditation each day that can be read from the book or downloaded in an audio format.

“Each day that you practice this new way of thinking about yourself and about life will help erase the old, negative messages you have been carrying for so long,” Hay says in the book. “Soon you will be smiling more and finding it easier to look in the mirror. Soon the affirmations will start to feel true.”

The below adaptation is taken from the Welcome chapter, including an exercise from Day 1:

Mirror work — looking yourself deeply into your eyes and repeating affirmations — is the most effective method I’ve found for learning to love yourself and see the world as a safe and loving place. I have been teaching people how to do mirror work for as long as I have been doing? affirmations. Put simply, whatever we say or think is an affirmation. All of your self-talk, the dialogue in your head, is a stream of affirmations. These affirmations are messages to your subconscious that are? establishing habitual ways of thinking and behaving. Positive affirmations plant healing thoughts and ideas that support you in developing self-confidence and self-esteem, and creating peace of mind and inner joy.

The most powerful affirmations are those you say out loud when you are in front of your mirror. The mirror reflects back to you the feelings you have about yourself. It makes you immediately aware of where you are resisting and where you are open and flowing. It clearly shows you what thoughts you will need to change if you want to have a joyous, fulfilling life.

As you learn to do mirror work, you will become much more aware of the words you say and the things you do. You will learn to take care of yourself on a deeper level than you have done before. When something good happens in your life, you can go to the mirror and say, “Thank you, thank you. That’s terrific! Thank you for doing this.” If something bad happens to you, you can go to the mirror and say, “Okay, I love you. This thing that just happened will pass but I love you, and that’s forever.”

For most of us, sitting in front of a mirror and facing ourselves is difficult at first, so we call this process mirror work. But as you continue, you become less self-critical, and the work turns into mirror play. Very soon your mirror becomes your companion, a dear friend instead of an enemy.

Doing mirror work is one of the most loving gifts you can give yourself. It takes only a second to say, “Hi, kid,” or “Looking good,” or “Isn’t this fun?” It’s so important to give yourself little positive messages throughout the day. The more you use mirrors for complimenting yourself, approving of yourself, and supporting yourself during difficult times, the deeper and more enjoyable your relationship with yourself will become…

Your Day 1 Mirror Work Exercise

Stand or sit in front of your bathroom mirror.
Look into your eyes.
Take a deep breath and say this affirmation: “I want to like you. I want to really learn to love you. Let’s go for it and really have some fun.”
Take another deep breath and say: “I’m learning to really like you. I’m learning to really love you.”
This is the first exercise, and I know it can be a little challenging, but please stay with it. Keep taking deep breaths. Look into your eyes. Use your own name as you say I’m willing to learn to love you, [Name]. I’m willing to learn to love you.
Throughout the day, each time you pass a mirror or see your reflection, please repeat these affirmations, even if you have to do it silently.

Dr. David Hamilton: Science, Healing & Self-Love

Posted on by Tammy

Known for his books on the power of thought and the mind when it comes to healing, Dr. David Hamilton recently released his new book “I Heart Me,” focused on the scientific power of self-love, and how we can use the mind and emotions to change how we feel about ourselves — and create wellbeing, success and more.

Elevated Existence Magazine interviewed Dr. Hamilton for its March 2015 issue cover story, and below is a sneak peek at some of the insights found in the article!

The Healing Power of the Mind
The first book Dr. David Hamilton published after leaving his job as a scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, where he was building drugs for cardiovascular disease and cancer, was “It’s the Thought That Counts: Why Mind Over Matter Really Works.” It focused on the mind body connection, and the connection between our consciousness and the world — all backed by scientific research.

“While working as a scientist, I started to notice how many people were recovering on placebos for drugs we were spending a quarter of a billion dollars developing,” he tells Elevated Existence. “I started looking into the mind body connection while I was working full time, and I realized there was so much information out there nobody seemed to know about.”

So he resigned from his job and started to weave together his scientific background with consciousness, spirituality and the mind body connection. His book “How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body” shows how positive thinking and visualization can work remarkably well when it comes to healing physical ailments and disease.

“After I published my first book, people would come up to me at lectures and workshops and tell me how they used the mind body principles to heal themselves,” he notes. “People were visualizing cancer tumors shrinking, for example, and they were all intuitively using the same mind body principles like visualization. I started looking into the neuroscience and psycho immunology so I could build a framework and understanding I could explain to my mom, dad or anyone off the street. There was so much science that validated it.”

In the book, he shares a Harvard study where volunteers played a series of piano notes up and down a scale for two hours, over five consecutive days. The scientists saw significant changes in the area of their brains connected to the finger muscles. By the fifth day, the brain had grown like a muscle and was significantly bigger. They also had a group of people who visualized playing the piano in the same way rather than actually doing it, and they also had their brain mapped to measure the results.

“Amazingly, the same regions of the brain had changed to the same extent as those who were actually playing the notes,” he says. “The brain was not making any distinction between those who were actually playing the keys on the piano and those who just visualized playing the keys. I use this example to help people understand, what you think about, what you imagine, really has an effect. It gives people faith in themselves.”

Visualization for Self-Love
In the book “How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body,” Dr. Hamilton shares a variety of visualizations and techniques to heal the body of physical ailments. In his new book, “I Heart Me,” he explains how visualization can also change our brain when it comes to self-love.

“Instead of visualizing inside the body, like you would do to shrink cancer or make a blood vessel healthier, what you do is visualize moving your body,” he tells Elevated Existence. “Visualize how you are walking, standing, speaking, breathing, from a place of ‘I am enough.’ Watch yourself interacting with people where you had previously acted in a way you felt small. Watch yourself standing tall, speaking with confidence, saying the things you want to say. Because the brain can’t distinguish real from imaginary, you are now rewiring the brain.”

If done on a regular basis, we can actually shape the circuits of the brain and will find ourselves functioning in the world with the kind of body language we are imagining, he says. And it only takes five minutes of visualization a day.

“It’s like a fast forward way of changing how you actually function in the world,” Hamilton says, explaining if we want to speed up the process even more, we can do it for 10 minutes, three times per day. “Five minutes is easier for people, especially with the busy lives we have. But you will start to notice a change, and it won’t even feel like you had to put much effort into it.”

For more from Dr. Hamilton, see the full March 2015 issue of Elevated Existence, which includes an article on author Mira Kelley and past life regression; a Course in Miracles column from Gary Renard and more!

Congressman Tim Ryan Talks Mindfulness & The Real Food Revolution

Posted on by Tammy

Last year, Congressman Tim Ryan published his book “The Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance Recapture the American Spirit,” and shared how mindfulness and meditation can transform one’s life. Now he is releasing a new book called “The Real Food Revolution: Healthy Eating, Green Groceries and the Return of the American Family Farm,” encouraging the public to take control of their own health starting in their own kitchen.

Last Thursday, gathered at Deepak Homebase in ABC Carpet & Home in New York, he spoke about his passion on the topic, and was joined by New York Times bestselling author Dr. Mark Hyman and producer of the films “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Fed Up,” Laurie David. “Fed Up,” is a documentary featuring Katie Curic, President Bill Cliton and others, exposing the food industry and sugar.

“I was inspired by the film ‘Fed Up,’” said Congressman Tim Ryan. “Stress effects our health, but it’s also our food. Through a mindfulness practice you start to see how things are interconnected, and it kept coming back to food for me.”

He explained how his wife realized she had a gluten allergy, and they went to see Dr. Mark Hyman to get help. He emphasized diet and how if she shifted it, she could heal herself. Hyman asked her what type of food she ate as a child, and how many antibiotics she took. After a few months of dietary changes, she began to feel better and is now healthier then she ever was before, said Ryan.

‘In Washington we put things in silos, like food, education, healthcare, and we need to start seeing how all of them are interconnected,” he said. “This may be the first generation that may not live as long as their parents.”

His new book is about how Americans can begin to build out a new food system and instead of subsidizing companies who make processed food to make it more affordable, we should be subsidizing the agriculture and farmers so they can move to a new type of farming that is healthier for Americans.

Ryan also suggested starting with major universities, such as Ohio where he is from. Ohio University has 60,000 students and if they agreed to take 2 percent of the food budget and spend it on locally sourced vegetables and fruits, and then increased it to 4 percent and then 6 percent, that is how we can create a market for the farmers.

“What about public schools and prisons, which are now relying on highly processed foods,” he said, explaining we need to start educating every child in America how to eat properly.

“We need a garden in every school yard and a kitchen in every singles school, and a salad bar in every cafeteria,” Ryan said. “We need Homec 2.0. If we are going to be a competitive country, you have to be a healthy one.”

Dr. Mark Hyman also spoke, explaining his approach is to treat the person as a whole, and to treat the cause not just the symptom, which is a paradigm shift for many doctors today. And much of the disease we deal with today begins with the flora balance in out gut. Our gut health is connected to our immune system, brain function, metabolism, and many issues faced today, from autism, depression, auto immune disease, eczema, asthma and migraines can go back to the flora in the gut, Hyman noted.

Additionally, Laurie David spoke and said the film “Fed Up” opened the eyes of many people to how much sugar is hidden in our foods, and how giving up processed foods and beginning to cook again is an important step in the Real Food Revolution.

“We have been told it takes too long and is too hard to cook, but these are marketing myths the food industry convinces us with,” she noted. “Our children are not being given a chance at a healthy future.”

She pointed out a deal Girl Scouts of America has with Nesquik to create a Thin Mint Chocolate Milk, but this chocolate milk has 12 teaspoons of sugar per serving, she explained.

“That is more than a kid should have in four days,” David said. “One mom who is a Girl Scout troop leader was outraged and started a petition on Change.org that people can sign now.”

SIGN THE PETITION HERE

She shared that 4 grams of sugar on a label is equal to 1 tsp of sugar, and one of the easiest ways to begin to eliminate processed ingredients and sugar is to make our own salad dressing. Sugar is the single biggest toxin we face, Hyman added, explaining its poisoning America more than any other toxin.

“We’ve outsourced our kitchens to corporations,” said Hyman. “We do have to cook ourselves out of this mess, and we do have to do it one kitchen at a time.”

For more information on Tim Ryan’s new book click here: “The Real Food Revolution: Healthy Eating, Green Groceries, and the Return of the American Family Farm”.

For more information on Mark Hyman click here.

For more information on the film Fed Up click here.

The Daily Love’s Mastin Kipp on the Gift of Fear

Posted on by Tammy

The Daily Love founder Mastin Kipp just published his first book, “Daily Love: Growing into Grace,” and Elevated Existence Magazine interviewed Kipp for it’s September 2014 issue cover story, where he shared his tips and advice on facing fear, taking action, finding purpose and more.

For many people, fear stops them in their tracks. They see it as an alarm going off to warn them they should not move forward. But Kipp tells Elevated Existence he sees fear as the opposite. He views it as a compass directing us toward exactly what we need to do in order to grow.

“I always say unless you are in mortal danger, fear is a compass showing you where to go because there are teachers who will tell you to live a fearless life, and I think that’s B.S.,” he says. “I think we want to live what I call a ‘fear-full’ life because if you think about it, right before the most incredible times in your life, you were terrified. That is a sign you are growing. So I say follow the fear rather than making yourself wrong for being afraid.”

Moving past fear means finding enough strength in our heart to override what our head is telling us in order to keep us safe. While the heart calls us to tell the person we love them, leave the relationship, start the business, or move toward our desires, the mind is busy coming up with all the excuses of why it’s not safe to do these things, he says.

“All the things you have ever wanted to do are outside your comfort zone and by definition will make you afraid,” Kipp notes. “Fear is something very real that we have to deal with because it’s a biochemical response in the brain that gets triggered when we step into uncertainty.”

For the full interview, see our September 2014 issue.

Kipp challenges people to make a list of the top three to five things they are afraid to do in life – whether it has to do with fitness, romance, spirituality, business, wellbeing or even setting boundaries – and then take the steps toward doing the things on the list despite the fear.

“Most of my work boils down to, ‘What are the three to five things you are scared to do, and why aren’t you doing them?’” he says. “It’s a simplification of the work I do, but that’s really it. When people realize they have permission to do what they love, that the limiting beliefs they tell themselves are just the brain trying to keep them safe – and most of it is just B.S. – and they surround themselves with people who have achieved the outcome they want to achieve, miracles happen.”

To override the fear response and help us move toward our goals, there are a number of tools available, including meditation, yoga, EFT, tapping and more. Any one of these can help calm the fight or flight response so we can take what Kipp calls “courageous action,” which is taking action despite fear.

“We would never want to take the fear away because that is your opportunity to grow, but there are plenty of techniques you can use to calm down the brain so it’s more manageable,” he notes.

For the full interview, see our September 2014 issue.

Dr. Wayne Dyer Shares Insights from His New Book

Posted on by Tammy

On June 26, 2012, Dr. Wayne Dyer announced to his children that he was no longer going to write books. He said he was done with that part of his life, and was ready to move into a new phase. But on June 27, 2012, he woke up and started writing. And found he couldn’t stop even if he tried. The result is his newest book, “I Can See Clearly Now.”

“On the 27th of June, I woke up and I started writing, and I wrote for like five months in a row, every single day, morning, noon and night. I just couldn’t bring myself to stop writing,” he said on a media conference call in December 2013. “It gave this indication that there’s something bigger moving the checkers around in this checkerboard called life. That there’s something bigger than that, and I got into a zone.”

His newest book is an autobiography of sorts, where he reveals how while we are all making choices every day, there is also a force greater than us operating in our lives. He uses the turning points in his own life to illustrate this teaching.

“It seems to me, as I look back on my life, that thing that’s called eternal time, which is where everything is already handled at once, is operating at the same time as what’s called chromos time, or chronological time, or cause and effect time,” he explained on the call. “That my life, your life, everyone’s life, isn’t just a series of causes and effects that come out of the past. We’re also pulling things out of the future.”

One of the choices we can make is how we learn and grow, or come to a place of enlightenment. This can be done through suffering, through being in the moment, or through aligning with our intuition, said Dyer, explaining how there were many times in his life where he came to enlightenment through suffering.

Once example is spending 10 or 15 years of his life drinking beer every single day, not eating right and not feeling very good.

“I also got to a point where I realized this was just not something that was good. So that’s enlightenment through suffering, and this is true in so many of the things in our lives. All of our different relationships that worked and then didn’t work, all of our financial problems that we encountered, health problems, and so on, that you go through … and then all of a sudden you realize I’ve got to change the way I eat. I’ve got to change the way I exercise. I’ve got to do something about that,” he said.

The second way of enlightenment, or self-actualization, is enlightenment through being in the present moment, so when these things are happening to us — a breakup of a relationship, a fire that burned down our home, the death of someone close to us — we can make the choice not to suffer.

“Instead of saying, ‘Now I’m going to go through this long period of time in which I’m going to suffer, I’m going to be incapacitated as a result of this,’ you shift to being in the moment and saying, ‘What’s in it for me? What’s the lesson here right now? What can I get out of it?’” he noted.

There is also a third stage of enlightenment, where our intuition takes over, and we can see things coming our way before they arrive — where we are in a “collaboration with fate,” and realize, if we put our awareness on something, we can prevent it from happening in our life in an “incapacitating way.”

“You can make your choice on all of this,” said Dr. Dyer. “You can go through this lifetime of suffering, or you can get back to where you’re in a state of gratitude for everything that’s taking place in the moment, and deflect it away, or you can become anticipatory. And this is the exciting time. This is when miracles take place.”

A CLEAR VIEW
While we all have choices and free will in our lives, there is still a universal force working on our behalf to create opportunities and events we need in order to grow. Looking back on his life, Dyer can see the factors that took place in order to lead him where he is now. For example, living in an orphanage taught him to be self reliant, something he has dedicated his life to teaching others.

“I didn’t just choose to have the father that I have, and have him abandon our family and have him just walk out on us and make a choice to go into an orphanage, but there was something moving the pieces around that said, ‘If you are going to teach, you are going to sign up for a whole lifetime of self-reliance, and you better learn how to rely upon yourself as a young boy, and you better learn how to serve others,’” he explained.

Another example of a force behind his conscious choice was growing up with an alcoholic stepfather who watched Bishop Fulton Sheen on “Life isWorth Living,” rather than “The Milton Berle Show,” which was popular at that time. With only one television set in the house, this is what everyone watched.

“I still remember watching Bishop Fulton Sheen as a young boy and being engrossed in something called ‘Life is Worth Living,’ and I think, ‘Was I making that choice? How did that alcoholic man come into my life for those four or five years, and how did it turn me around?’” he said.

“Out of the 40 books that I have written, the subtitle of every one of them could be called ‘Life is Worth Living.’ It was a hugely impactful thing for me. I look back and I think, ‘Was I making choices?’ Yes, I was. I was making choices. I could have just gone off into my room or sulked or left or whatever, but I sat there and watched and took notes.”

His new book, “I Can See Clearly Now,” is about looking at the choices we make, as well as the factors taking place beyond our control, and realizing if we look at life happening now, we can begin noticing these things as they happen.

One of the most significant turning points in his life was when he visited his father’s grave in 1974 after being angry with him for many years. He sat at the grave, cursing at him for several hours, and then he said, “I forgive you. From this moment on, I send you love.” At that moment, something shifted inside of him.

“I don’t know what it was or how it happened to get there — all of the coincidences that coalesced in order for me to arrive at that place in Biloxi, Miss., on the 30th of August, 1974 — but all I know is that I just left this gravesite feeling completely different,” Dyer said. “I had just sent him love from that moment on and said, ‘Who am I to judge you? You did what you knew how to do given the conditions of your life and how can I ask you to be anything other than what you are?’ I just let go of it, and I went back and I wrote ‘Your Erroneous Tones’ in 14 days down in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.”

Thinking about his father and the impact he had on his life, he knows he will understand much more when he leaves his current body, but understands there was meaning behind it all.

“Perhaps he incarnated into this world in order for his younger son to figure out how to forgive so that he could impact millions of people. Who am I to question any of it? That is probably the most significant moment in my life and in that book as well,” Dyer explained.