“I know there must be more than this,” I thought as I stood on the windswept shores of the wintery Great Lakes. Looking back at the city where I had become a successful international entrepreneur, I felt emptiness, a deep longing. In all my attaining I had missed something very fundamental. I didn’t know what it was but I knew there must be more than all these toys, all the external trappings of an outwardly “successful” life. Yes – there were moments of happiness but the deep inner joy that I somehow knew was possible did not seem to be here. How can I find it? What do I need to get, what do I need to add to what I already had? I didn’t know, but I was about to find out.
Life as we know it in our modern technological universe puts the world literally at our fingertips. Computers, the internet, cell phones that do most anything except transport us to the moon (yet). Our world is full of information. And yet, why is it so many of us are still looking for the answer to our own happiness? Why do you suppose, with all the self-improvement classes, self-help books, self-development workshops, we are still unable to find what makes us deeply truly happy? We seem to be in ceaseless search of the magical remedy that is just around the next corner, the weight loss plan that will be the final answer to the weighty problems in our life, the spiritual practice that will deliver enlightenment in the same box in which the book of the same name was delivered. We are constantly looking to improve and for most of us improvement means more of this or more of that. That’s not so simple.
“Less is more” the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright is credited to have said. I didn’t fully appreciate what that meant until one night, as I sat in my bedroom, now without a bed. I had given that away as I had all my material possessions. I sat on the floor with a simple candle lighting the room. A one-way ticket across the ocean was in my backpack and the address of an ashram in South India. As I gazed into the candle flame the stillness permeated my whole body. Moments later a blazing light filled the room and I felt free for the first time in my whole life. I had nothing – nothing, that is, but freedom. It was simple.
The next several years of my life were spent as a monk roaming in India, Nepal and Tibet. Life was joyful and simple. I was blessed to be able to study with some of the world’s most enlightened beings of the day. Interlaced with exquisite meditative experiences the most mundane of life’s encounters became laughable. Never certain if the next meal might be a simple bowl of rice an dhal or a month’s old chocolate bar, I happily accepted all of life as it arose. I was truly happy. It was simple.
Returning to the west was not so simple I began to notice a tumor had appeared on the side of my neck. It was the size of a lemon and growing. After trying most of the alternative and energetic therapies, none of which had any positive impact, I was led to a neighbor who invited me into a rather simple process of introspection. In less than six weeks, the tumor was gone. It erupted out of the side of my neck leaving no trace of it ever having been here. It was quite an astonishing experience. I later came to know this simple process as “The Journey.” Here is how it all began.
As a result of naturally healing a basketball size tumor in her abdomen in only six and a half weeks, Brandon Bays, the founder of the profound work called “The Journey” discovered a powerful means to get direct and immediate access to the infinite healing potential within her own body. The spontaneous healing occurred when an old memory of an intense childhood trauma flashed before her. By allowing herself to fully feel the emotions, empty out the words associated with the situation, and experience true forgiveness, her body wisdom was able to powerfully take over and transform her cells naturally and perfectly, as they were designed by nature to do.
How is this possible? The word of famed endocrinologist Dr. Deepak Chopra and renowned cellular biologist Dr. Candace Pert may lend some clues.
Dr. Deepak Chopra, who made a life study of successful survivors of illness, found they had two things in common:
- They were able to access something beyond the mind to stimulate healing; Chopra calls this “Infinite Intelligence.”
- They were able to let go of memories stored at a cellular level.
Cells in the body regenerate at different speeds. In the eye they take only 48 hours, whereas cells in the liver take 6 weeks to regenerate. The question is: what stops these cells from regenerating healthily? Dr. Chopra postulated that memories can be stored in the cells and can cause degenerative disease patterns to be passed on, preventing healthy new cell replication.
Dr. Candace Pert went further in her book Molecules of Emotion, which describes her Nobel Prize nominated research on “how emotions affect our bodies at the cellular level.” If trauma and negative emotions are not resolved, they become physically stored as a cellular memory, preventing those cells involved from playing their part in the constant chemical communication taking place within the body and the brain.
When emotions are suppressed, a specific biochemistry is released into the blood stream and blocks certain cell receptors, which are then isolated and cannot communicate with any other cells in the body. If these cells remain blocked over time and if disease happens, it’s likely to happen in the part of the body where the cells are blocked.
These memories “switch off” these cells, and they can lead to emotional and physical disease years after the events originally occurred. We have found that Journey processes can enable one to let go of these memories, “switching on” your cells, and enabling them to once again regenerate perfectly. It is exciting to note that science and emotional well-being are finally uniting to create optimal health!
Everyone simply wants to be happy. This is a universal condition. So why is it so few of us are truly happy? There is a living intelligence inside all of us waiting to open us to the joy, he genius, the freedom, and the love that rests as unborn potential within each of us. Somehow, as we go through this process we call life we seem to get further away from the happiness we are seeking. We seem to find ourselves blocked, limited, restricted from being all we can be. Our issues arise as anger, fear, depression, grief, hurt, and anxiety. It may be as simple as knowing there must be something more to life, or as complex as feeling a complete failure. It may be as debilitating as an addiction or as life threatening as serious illness or simply the obscuration of an outdated belief about life that holds us back, that sabotages us, keeping us from being all we can be. We feel driven to strive to find “it” somewhere “out there.”
Our bodies talk to us all the time. We all have cell memories stored in our bodies that in some way have been holding us back, blocking us from being all we can be. These cell memories are waiting to come up… waiting to set us free… Are you listening to your body? The body never lies! Your body is giving you messages in the form of body sensations. Feelings. Emotions. Non-feelings. Are you listening? What are the silent saboteurs in your life? Those deep seeded parts of you that keep saying things to you… that are not supportive… maybe even destructive or abusive. Things that keep you powerless and believing you need to just get over it, that this is just how life is. The lies the silent saboteur can tell are endless.
It truly is simple. As Michelangelo the artist of the famed sculpture “David” said when asked how he could create such a magnificent piece of art, “The statue was in the stone all along. I simply removed the parts that didn’t belong.” You can remove the parts and pieces that don’t belong. You can leave behind the ancient programming that was not even yours in the first place.
No matter how deep the issue and no matter how much you have struggled with it, the possibility exists for you to become absolutely free, whole, even healed. You are capable of getting to the root cause of these issues, resolving them, letting them go completely and setting yourself free to live your life at your highest potential, as a full expression of your own true self. Like Michelangelo, it’s simple. You just need to remove the parts that don’t belong to the majesty, the miracle of you. In that, you liberate yourself from the bondage of living a life by default and unleash your innate power to create your life by design. It’s simple.
In the next issue of CoSozo Living, we’ll go into some of the specific elements of The Journey so that you can understand even more just how powerful, profound, and yet simple the process can be.
