E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality (19 page)

Are you getting what I’m saying?

What you think and say about yourself, your body, and your food is the hinge upon which your health turns. Counting calories and fat grams with religious zealotry may well be the main obstacle between you and your ideal weight.

Food Fight

“The more obsessed one is with getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there.”

—A
UGUSTEN
B
URROUGHS
, A
MERICAN AUTHOR

Diets are the enemy. They make you paranoid, insane, and fat. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that diets don’t work. So why do we persist in depriving and disciplining ourselves in the name of diets when they obviously suck sewer slime. Think of it like this: If you went to collect your paycheck and your boss said, “Sorry, but we’ve decided not to pay you this week,” would you keep working at that job, week after week, hoping that someday he’d have a change of heart? Even the spelling of the word should give us a clue. Who wants to do anything with the word
die
in it?

Suffice it to say, most of us have a very complex relationship with food. Just ask the $60-billion-a-year diet industry. Instead of enjoying food’s awesome and life-giving nourishment, we fear it, despise it, and blame it for the picture we see in the mirror. Can anyone say
love-hate relationship?

As long as you harbor negative energy about yourself and spend time
wanting
to lose weight, that’s what you’ll get: negativity and “the state of wanting to lose weight.”

Not only is this type of thinking counterproductive, but it keeps you stuck with the body you’re currently in. Your body is a barometer of your belief system. Your cells eavesdrop on everything you say and think, and by making disparaging comments about your jiggly forearms or turning over the same thought again and again about the inner tube around your waist, you’re stamping them into the muscles, glands, and tissues of your body.

This may come as a shock to you—especially if you spend most of your waking moments silently harping about your ugly, cellulite-ridden body—but the normal state of your body is healthy. It can heal and regulates itself without any prompting from you. But when you keep tabs and count calories with frenetic abandon, you refuse to let your body change.

Anecdotal Evidence

“Our body is a walking crystal. We store electro-magnetic energy. We can receive, we can transmit and we can store electro-magnetic energy.”

—D
R
. N
ORMAN
S
HEALY
,
A
MERICAN HOLISTIC RESEARCH PHYSICIAN AND NEUROSURGEON

When Alan Finger, a now-famous yoga teacher, was in his teens, he lost 100 pounds in—are you sitting down?—one month.

After studying in India, his father, Mani Finger, brought back a powerful yogic breathing program that he taught to his overweight son.

Within one month of using the breathing exercises, a powerful tool for moving energy, Alan dropped 100 pounds.

I know what you’re thinking. That’s impossible, it can’t be done.

So let me stop you right there. Thoughts like that, thoughts that scoff at infinite possibility, are getting in your way. To change your energy you have to change your thinking. The word
impossible
should not be part of your vocabulary.

A friend of mine had been trying to lose weight for probably 30 years. She tried everything, including exercise and consuming tiny amounts of food. Nothing worked. She finally consulted with an Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) specialist even though she had trouble believing that something as simple as tapping on the body’s meridian points could actually be effective at winning the weight battle she’d fought for so many years. But she was desperate. Within a month of unblocking her stuck energy, she lost every one of those stubborn pounds. She has been able to keep off that weight, and still looks fabulous today.

As for Alan Finger losing 100 pounds in one measly month (you can read about it in
Breathing Space,
a book he wrote with fellow yoga teacher Katrina Repka), what do you have to lose by believing it’s possible?

I also highly recommend a book called
The Biology of Belief,
by Bruce Lipton. He’s a cell biologist who used to teach at Stanford University. He discovered that, despite what we all believe, our bodies are influenced more by energy and the thoughts we have than they are by our DNA.

Lipton tells a remarkable story about a group of patients with problematic knees. The first group underwent complicated knee surgery. The second group believed that they, too, had had the surgery. But the doctor conducting the research made the incisions on the second group, but didn’t actually operate. So nothing about their knees was changed. Both groups, however, got better. Both groups were soon able to walk and play basketball and do all the things they had done before their knee injuries.

Now, that’s a pretty strong placebo effect and should be proof positive that you need to see yourself as thin and gorgeous, negative thinking be damned. Whatever you focus on in your life expands, as
Experiment #5
demonstrates. So if you focus on being fat and needing to diet, that “reality” is going to expand in your life.

The Method

“Life itself is the proper binge.”

—J
ULIA
C
HILD
, A
MERICAN AUTHOR, CHEF, AND
TV
PERSONALITY

In this experiment, you’re going to give up your ongoing grudge against the food you eat. You’re going to think of every single morsel that enters your body as your best friend, or at least a thoroughly nourishing acquaintance.

Energy worker Thomas Hanna says that when we look at a person’s body, we’re observing the moving process of that person’s mind. It’s our beliefs about ourselves, more than the banana-cream pie we couldn’t resist, that cause us to gain weight.

So for starters in this experiment, you’re going to refrain from saying anything negative about your body. You may notice this is hard to do. Every time you make a disparaging comment, turn it around—if not out loud, then at least silently to yourself. For example, your best friend calls and without thinking you blurt out, “I ate a whole bag of buttered popcorn at the movie yesterday. I probably gained eight pounds.” Cancel it by saying something like, “Well, I did spill half the bag when Antonio Banderas took off his shirt, and I actually think I look thinner.” (You don’t have to be modest. It’s okay to admit that you’re a knockout!)

Food is full of energetic juju, and eating should be a thoroughly positive experience. We’ve gotten so far off track on this that this experiment could be the very hardest for most people to undertake.

Because feeling guilt about food is such an ingrained habit, this might feel completely unnatural. It might take some practice. You might even have to repeat this experiment if you notice the old patterns creeping back in, if you find yourself wondering how many calories or fat grams you’re about to consume. That’s why this experiment takes 72 hours rather than the 48 hours of most of the other experiments.

What we’re looking to prove is that your thoughts and energy are in a continual dance with the world around you.

Remember when people used to pray before meals? My family always did, even at restaurants, which embarrassed me to no end when I was in junior high. Now I know those prayers put positive energy and good thoughts into the food—not that we were conscious of it at the time. But I must tell you that nobody in my family has ever had much of a weight problem.

So during this experiment, you’re going to do the following:

That’s it. Weigh yourself the day you start, and again three days later.

Lab Report Sheet

The Principle:
The Jenny Craig Principle

The Theory:
Your thoughts and consciousness provide the scaffolding for your physical body.

The Question:
Does what I think affect my environment—specifically, the food I take into my body?

The Hypothesis:
If my thoughts and consciousness are in a continuous dance with my environment, the food I eat can’t help but be affected by my thoughts. By changing what I think about and say to my food, I will be healthier and, for the sake of this experiment, lose at least one pound.

Time Required:
72 hours

Today’s Date:
__________

Weight as Recorded First Thing in the Morning:
________

Weight as Recorded First Thing in the Morning, Three Days Later:
__________

The Approach:
Don’t change a single thing about your diet. In fact, what you eat should be a nonissue during the time period of this experiment. However, every time you do eat something over the next three days, whether it’s your morning over-easy eggs or an afternoon slice of a co-worker’s birthday cake, deliberately and consciously send the food positive, loving thoughts before ingesting it. Thank it for nourishing you and expect it to contribute to the betterment of your body.

Research Notes:
______________________________________

____________________________________________________

“You manufacture beauty with your mind.”

—A
UGUSTEN
B
URROUGHS
, A
MERICAN AUTHOR

EXPERIMENT #8

THE 101 DALMATIANS PRINCIPLE:
You Are Connected to Everything
and Everyone Else in the Universe

“I am because we are.”

—T
ENET OF THE
S
OUTH
A
FRICAN PHILOSOPHY KNOWN AS
U
BUNTU

The Premise

In this experiment, you’ll prove that you are interconnected with everyone and everything through an “invisible” field of intelligence and energy. In quantum-speak, this lattice of connections is called
nonlocality.

And even though it’s one of the signature concepts of quantum mechanics, nonlocality, along with its cousin entanglement, has incited much head-scratching over the last 300 years, starting with Sir Isaac Newton, who considered what he called “action at a distance” ludicrous (despite the fact that his own theory of gravity had proposed just such a phenomenon). To be brief, nonlocality is when two particles behave synchronously with no intermediary.

But it doesn’t make logical sense, right? If you want to move, say, an abandoned shoe in the middle of the floor, you have to touch the shoe or touch a broom that touches the shoe or instruct your five-year-old, the one who left it there, to pick it up, via vibrations through the air to his ear. Things can only affect things that are in the immediate vicinity. There has to be a sequence, a chain of events. We believe that we can only alter things we can touch.