Corona Virus--Can Forgiveness, Positive Thoughts and Actions Help You Stay Well?

A good friend of mine, Gwendalyn Gilliam, just wrote the following article which I liked so much, I asked for permission to include here.  Reading it opened my eyes to some new ways to think about Coronavirus as it becomes present in our world:

10 WAYS TO BEAT CORONAVIRUS

Gwendalyn Gilliam, LMT

It’s true. There’s a virus out there and it’s spreading rampantly, easily, (no one is  exactly sure how); and it’s a nasty one that can potentially kill you. At the current rate, it’s pretty clear that eventually every one of us will probably wind up getting exposed, despite our best efforts.

Whether it evolved naturally or was, as rumored, engineered; the fact of this disease breaking out in the world’s foremost hub of economic productivity represents the equivalent of a global physical and financial attack, one that we can beat collectively if enough of us step back to see the bigger picture and change our fear habits.

Here are my top 10 things you can do today to beat Coronavirus. 

Some of them come from a natural healing/quantum physics perspective and though proven to be powerful and effective, you may find them surprising and even controversial. You don’t have to actually believe them, just be willing to, and then open up to watch them begin to work. It’s the willingness that cracks open the darkness and lets in the light, so tell yourself right now: “Whatever this is, if it will help save me physically and financially, I am willing to believe it, and if I can’t fully, it’s okay. I’m staying open.”

  1.  Look at the Facts...

It’s easy to let our minds get wrapped around the flagpole of panic and despair, but rather than do that, it’s important to pause and take a look at the evidence. First of all, COVID-19 (Coronavirus) hasn’t killed a drop in the bucket compared to the plain old flu this year. At this writing the global death toll for Coronavirus is 2,800, compared to this year’s whopping estimated 291,000-646,000 from regular flu. If you average the estimated range you get 468,500, or 167X more deaths than from Coronavirus.

But it’ just beginning, you say. So let’s compare the infection vs. death rate to that from MERS a few years ago, which had a 34.4% death rate. Although no one is standing firm on the numbers, it looks like Coronavirus is killing somewhere between 3-7%. Fully 81% of those infected have mild cases, and no one under the age of 10 has died.

Which is where you and your health and immunity come in to play, and here’s the very good news. You can do a lot to build up your immune system, both physically and energetically, and in this you have total control.

     2.  Say Goodbye to Hand Sanitizers and Germicides

You may think I’m robbing you of your first line of defense against the virus, but the opposite is true. Let’s take back the power we’ve given the germ (i.e. bacterial, viral and fungal) world.  There are healthy germs and mean ones. We carry more bacteria in our gut, by a large margin, than we have cells in our entire bodies. We’re born with them and we couldn’t digest our food without them.

How did it happen that we came to hand our power over to tiny microbes? To explain we need to go back in history to a little known event at the death bed of Louis Pasteur, champion of the germ theory, which won out over his competing contemporary, Joseph Hahnemann, and his theory of homeopathic medicine. (Had it gone differently, today our whole idea of disease would be upturned and we’d all be taking remedies in milk sugar pellets under our tongues to increase rather and decrease our symptoms. Symptoms are often the body’s defenses at work: e.g., a fever burns out infection by circulating the blood faster and upping its friction with the vascular walls. (Side note: If you have body aches from flu, just relax the area and they will ease. The pain is from the muscles not allowing the vessels to expand under pressure of greater blood flow.)

It’s reported that as Pasteur breathed his last breath he admitted to the superiority of his rival’s theory, saying, “It’s not the mosquito, but the swamp it swims in.” In other words, the germs can only become as deadly as our defenses are weak. If it was only about germs we’d have no doctors, nurses or hospital staff. They’d all be dead.

Germs grow in microscopic gardens all around us, on every surface. When you use a hand sanitizer or chemical germicide at home you kill off the friendly flora and make room for the bad ones to go crazy and fill in the deficit. There was a study years ago that compared the germ count on the countertops of a meticulous housewife who used germicide to that of a bachelor who did not. And yes, the bachelor’s home was much cleaner germ wise and healthier because the natural counter balances, germ species to germ species, were still intact.

So let nature’s checks and balances take effect. You’re never going to erase all germs without an autoclave and a freezer, which would need to take them back and forth several times, and even then their spores would lie in wait for an opportune moment.

   3.  Let the Sun Shine In

In my college microbiology class we did an experiment with the disinfecting power of sunlight. We cut a paper capital E and laid it in the middle of the agar in a petri dish, held it outdoors in the sun for 2 minutes, then covered it and put it in an incubator. A week later we found a perfect letter E in fuzzy bacterial growth, with the rest of the dish completely clear. Were it not for the sun, our planet would be overrun with bacteria, viruses and fungi. That’s why mold grows in the dark.

    

4.  Create Your Immune Building Lifestyle

If you’ve been procrastinating getting into shape, now is a great excuse to start a moderate exercise regimen, which builds your immunity by circulating the healing factors in your blood.

Another great immune builder is to swim in cold water because it increases your body’s adaptability. If this isn’t possible or if you’re not that radically hardy, a long cold splash at the end of your shower is powerfully beneficial. If you can spare the water, going back between hot and cold a few times forces the blood to gush through your internal organs (hot) and then back to the skin (cold).

And of course, lots of rest, especially when you feel like you’re about to come down with something, provides your body the energy needed to fight the bug.

5.  Remedies

The effects of natural healing are much more subtle than consuming typical allopathic medicines which extract the active ingredient from an herb, isolating it from protective buffers, and then multiplying it as much as 1,000 times. So don’t expect a one pill wonder here. Natural healing works when each system (vascular, respiratory, digestive, hormonal and immune) supports the others.

Here’s a partial list and what they do:

Preventive:

--Celery juice dissolves all bacteria, viruses and fungus in the body

--Lemon water with honey and garlic (if you can stand it) cleanses the liver, increases hydration, adds Vitamin C and antioxidants, and reduces inflammation. The honey helps pull it into the liver, especially first thing in the morning

-- Ginseng, produces more antiviral protein

--Get Airborne.  It’s vitamin, herb and mineral blend supports immunity

--Intermittent cleansing and fasting eliminates toxins that feed pathogens (message me for more on this—I’m an aficionado since 1973!)

Remediative:

--Honeygar, warm water with up to 1 T vinegar and 1 t honey (you can reverse the amounts if you need to) throughout the day. The buffers in the vinegar absorb many times their weight in acid, alkalizing the body and rendering it less hospitable to germs. This treatment in particular can trigger a healing crisis, the disease’s last stand

--Supplements and Tinctures (can dose as much as hourly):

Echinacea, immune booster

Ginger, stimulates immunity to kill viruses

Elderberry, fights viruses

Cayenne, dries up mucus

Goldenseal, fights microorganisms and dries mucus

Oscillococcinum as directed relieves flu symptoms

      6.  Visualize White Light and Wellness Within You

As your mind and body work together, this technique calls your white blood cells to the area you’re working with. It’s easy to do when you’re well, much harder when you’re sick. I’ve used it to heal everything from plantar warts to pneumonia. It uses imagination, which is always the doorway to what you don’t know how to do. These three methods work the best:

A.     Picture a ball of white light for as long as you can sustain it if you feel, say, a little tickle in your throat, all the way to full blown symptoms.

B.     Imagine your body’s energy system flowing like a three-dimensional donut down through your core and out your feet, up around to enter the top of your head again. In this flow, introduce thousands of little white ninja stars spinning and slicing to pieces anything and everything that is not supposed to be there.

C.     If you are sick, imagine, in vivid detail, yourself: healthy and strong, playing with your full vitality in force. Your body will take this and run with it and it’s also entertaining and hopeful.

     7.  Laugh a Lot

Norman Cousins proved this by healing a life threatening illness by watching Marx Brothers movies and writing Anatomy of an Illness. Laughing gives you a mini workout, boosts immunity, wipes out stress, clears your mind, and improves natural killer cell activity.

      8.  Unify With You

Make sure that every thought you have about yourself is a good one. If you mess up, accept it. Letting your thoughts turn to self-judgment will take you down faster than anything, kind of like tearing a hole in your hot air balloon. Practice pivoting self-criticism from the voice in your head the moment you feel its disturbance. Just laugh, give yourself a hug and tell yourself something wonderful about you.

     9.  Financial Flexibility

More than the physical danger, the real threat Coronavirus poses is its attack upon our world’s economic prosperity. This we absolutely can turn around, individually and as a whole.

At a quantum level, it’s impossible for anything to come to us that doesn’t match our own frequency. While it’s easy to “awfulize” in a situation where there is financial uncertainty, it’s the most destructive thing you can do. Three weeks of worry, or negative visualization, can do your business in.

When you understand how absolute your sovereignty to create your life actually is, you never doubt that what comes to you is for your good. You’re able to take responsibility for negative events from the past in a way that may sound almost cruel: children who are starving every day! But the key is that we are immortal, so our lifetimes become more like costumes donned for a play of experience, none of which is either positive or negative, only what we decide them to be.

Realize that what comes to you is not what you wish to believe, but what you actually do believe, and therein lies the work. Again, it begins by opening to the possibility, not trying to force it, just sitting and being with it.

So if your financial security is threatened by Coronavirus, imagining how to change gears and begin something that will sustain you in this situation is much more productive, fun and encouraging than dreading the worst. Create your day the night before and say, “Tomorrow I am meeting remarkable people, and doing amazing things, and all the time I’m feeling so excited about my life and how great I can make it,” and when you wake, carry it into your day. Recognize doubt as just a refusal to participate.

   10.  Forgive the Situation

I believe that our souls come to this world to experience the greatest possible opportunity to grow, which is amply afforded on Earth by unlimited free will and the wildest of life challenges. Knowing this, you can apply the old metaphysical saying, “What you resist persists.” Forgiveness has nothing to do with ignoring a problem or pretending that it’s not bad. You don’t justify or make yourself vulnerable to it in the future. It’s simply about letting go. Refusing to forgive a person or situation is like drinking poison and hoping the other party will suffer for it. According to Sue Pipal’s book, Forgiveness is the Key to Freedom: It’s EasierThan You Think!

***

This Coronavirus outbreak actually provides a splendid opportunity for all of us as a human species to break the chains of fear that have held and driven us for thousands of years. I know that by creating our way out of Coronavirus panic we can all receive the priceless gem of knowing that the next time adversity strikes we can do it all over again and come out on top--all of us, doing our part, together, for the good of all. And I think we’re ready!

Namas-Day

I See You

I stumbled across this section in my reading of The Way of Mastery this morning:

"All minds are joined, and I see not a stranger before me, but one who walks as I walk, who feels as I feel, who longs as I long, who is humbled as I am humbled, who prays for peace as I have prayed.  

Therefore I will give them what they seek.  And in that giving, I receive it."  Way of Mastery p. 122

This is how forgiveness begins.  It occurs in the moment when we see others as being the same as ourselves.

All minds are joined and therefore, in many ways, they are, actually, us.

I found myself contemplating the line from the quote above, "therefore I will give them what they seek".  Just what do they seek?  Well, just as I do, everyone ultimately seeks love.  Everyone longs to be loved, to feel love and to give love in return.  It's our basic nature.  Love is what we are and we all seek to return to it.

What makes us feel loved?  Being loved is being recognized.  We feel loved when others acknowledge our existence, our worth, our truth.  When others accept and acknowledge us, we feel valued.  We all simply want to be seen.

In the movie Avatar, I love the way they say hello to each other. They stop and face each other and look directly into one another's eyes, "I see you."

I see you, is what it's all about.  Seeing and accepting the existence of another human being is the act of extending love.  Forgiveness happens in this moment. The miracle happens in this moment.  When we shift our thinking from fear to love, from confusion and opposition to acknowledgement, forgiveness happens.

We are simply knowing the truth, that ultimately we are all the same, despite the crazy things we all do here, despite the crazy dreams we follow in this insane 3D world we call earth.  At our core, in our joined minds, we are all, each and every one of us, simply love.

"Forgiveness is an act through which you learn what Love is, that carries you into a transcendence of the world.  Sharing only loving thoughts, supportive thoughts -- as you look gently upon the Christ in another is a way that takes you into the transcendence of the world.  Looking upon all things of this world and seeing their perfect harmlessness, their lack of ability to constrain you or harm you or imprison you, is a way that takes you beyond the world." --Way of Mastery p. 127-8

The Past is Over

These days, Robert Holden is my favorite author.  In December I read "Loveability". I was so impressed with it that I immediately bought a stack of copies and gave it to everyone I know for Christmas gifts.  My friends and family are just as impressed as I was.  

The day I turned the last page, I closed the book, set it aside for a month, opened it back up and started reading and studying it all over again.  I am now reading "Shift Happens!:  How to Live an Inspired Life" and I love it, too.  Robert Holden has been A Course in Miracles student and teacher for many years, but his explanations and point of view are very easy to understand and he relates so well to anyone's everyday experiences.  

Here's a little bit from a short section in Shift Happens about forgiving the past:

Forgiveness releases you from the past.  When you meditate on forgiveness, you learn that, in fact, there is no past in the MIND of God.  In other words, your past is never held against you unless you make it so.  Guilt is a choice and so is forgiveness.  When you choose guilt, you bury your gifts, you live in fear, and everyone misses what you could offer.  When you choose forgiveness, everyone can win.  

How do you know if you are holding on to your past?  You are unhappy!  When you are struggling, ask yourself, What am I holding on to from the past?  What old thought, old block, or old fear are you still clinging to?   

Holden encourages us to ask ourselves these important questions:

I am afraid of _______because in the past I _____________.

I have given up on ___________because in the past I ____________.

I am depressed now because in the past I ______________.

What are some of the areas in your life where you feel unhappy or unproductive, stymied, thwarted, victimized or stuck in lack?   Spend some time pondering those areas with these questions in mind.  Watch what comes up.  Then let it go.  It's the past.  It has nothing to do with the you of today.  It's holding you back in unhappiness.  It's nothing you need.  Guilt is nothing you need.  Rejection is nothing you need.  Lack is nothing you need.  Let it go.   Know it, feel it, love it and gently let it go.

One way to let these things go is to imagine that the Holy Spirit (your soul, your higher self) has given you a beautiful white light altar and it is right in front of you. This gorgeous marble light altar transforms everything upon it into pure love.  It's the love altar.

When these memories and emotions from the past come up, spend a few moments with them, intensify them and experiencing them all over again.  Then gently and lovingly ask them to place themselves on the altar.  Let them be released, transformed and swept away out of your life forever.  Let go.  Forgiving is the act of letting love replace fear.  It is that point when the miracle appears.

Holden suggests that we can then affirm "The past is over" and "Now is new".  He says, "The moment you let go of your past, you stop projecting it on to the present.

His final paragraph in the section is this:

To let go of your past, do these three things.  First, be willing to forgive yourself for every mistake you think you ever made.  Affirm "The past is over," and let forgiveness wipe away all tears.  Second, if you want to be free of your past mistakes, free everyone from theirs.  In other words, forgive everyone.  Third, pray, "Dear God, I'm back!"  Now let yourself be innocent again, free again, and ready again to say "Yes" to new healing, new happiness and a new futures.

 

 

 

We all want the same thing...

Recognize all whom you see as brothers, because only equals are at peace. --A Course in Miracles

Power struggles happen because we think we are both separate and different from each other.  We forget that we are both made of the same love and that we both share the same basic interest, which is to love and to be loved.  --Robert Holden



We are both made of the same love.

Every one of comes from the same source.

We are all made in the same image.

Love is what we are.

And we all want the same thing here on earth.  We want to know that love.  We want to experience the truth of ourselves.  It's sometimes hard to remember that truth here.  There are so many blocks to it.  And, of course, we've created them all ourselves.

But all we really want is know love, be love, receive love and give love.  Every action we take, every thought we think, it all boils down to one basic desire, and that is to know love again.

When you see someone behaving badly, just know that he is blocked from understanding and seeing his truth.  His motivation comes from the desire to be loved.  He is simply confused about how to actually achieve that.  He can't see it.

Give him the love he needs in the form of your forgiveness.


   

Judging Other People's "Conditions"

Don Miguel Ruiz Jr spoke at my church this morning.  He was excellent, deep and a fascinating speaker.  Much of what he said resonated with me.  I loved this on judging, especially.  He said that when we judge someone we are evaluating them for conditions that they never agreed to. 

What that means is that, we have created "opinions" and "beliefs" in our mind which are the conditions.  Our conditions are not necessarily someone elses conditions.   And yet, we look at others and judge them by our conditions.

We all have free will.  We are free to decide which experiences we want to have and which ones we don't want.

If we look at our lives here like a trip to Disneyland we can see that not everyone wants to ride on Space Mountain.  It's too fast for some people.  Some people just want to do the River Boat Cruise. They like slow.  They want to take their time and enjoy the sunshine.  It's dark in Space Mountain and the lights flash by in a jarring way.  On the River Boat Cruise you can listen to the sounds of birds in the trees.  You can watch the patterns the boat makes in the water as it passes through.

Who's right?  Is it the guy that likes fast, dark and scary Space Mountain or is it the one who prefers sunny, slow and peaceful River boating?

Of course, there's no right and wrong here.  We all get to choose our own adventure.  That's why we're here.  We choose an adventure and we learn some things along the way.  Our pathway and our learning is our pathway alone and no one elses.  We're all heading toward the same ultimate place, but how we get there is determined by each of us individually with our own free will.

Let's not judge anyone else's choices.  If they want to be the loud one, or the hairy one or the stubborn one, or the beautiful one or the deep thinking one, just let them be.  They never agreed to be a part of the group that thinks that beauty is important.  They never agreed to be a part of the group that loves to fight, or the group that likes living in the desert, or the group that wants to save the rain forest, or the group that thinks tattoos are cool.  Those aren't the conditions they adhere to.

They are learning just as we are.  Let's not judge what they choose to learn or how, where and when they do it.

What can we possibly know about why someone else chooses what they choose?  

It is when we begin to see that underneath, in mind, we're all the same anyway.  Strip away the loud, the hairy, the beauty and all that's left is mind.  Or we're all just alive, as Don Miguel Ruiz Jr liked to call it.  In essence we are only that life, that energy, that thought, that creator and nothing more.

We are not our bodies, our stuff, our professions, our skin color or any of our preferences.  We are all merely spirit, love, Divine.  Just the Divine having a little adventure here on earth.

What's Behind the Costume?

Even though I am a student of A Course in Miracles, I regularly attend a Science of Mind church.  My minister there, Rev. Liz Luoma, loves to refer to us all as adorable little packages of God.  We're all in different adorable packages, but underneath, we're really all just the same thing.

Last month when everyone was thinking about Halloween and costumes, she likened these packages to costumes.  When we come here to live on earth, we take on a costume (or a role or character), and we develop it and refine it throughout our lives.  In fact, our entire lives become about creating every little facet, characteristic, preference and circumstance for that very character.

Which costume have you chosen?

The Course likes to call these costumes the "ego".  The ego is our creation, not God's.  

Take away the costume, the role, the character, the ego and what is left underneath?  Why God stuff, of course.  That's all we really are.

We are really only playing a game of Charades. We fool ourselves into believing that our costumes are who we really are, but underneath the costume is actually our Truth.  Underneath the costume is the part of us that God created.  That part is timeless, endless, unlimited and perfect.  It is all that is and it is One with God.   And everyone of us shares in this.  We are all together, exactly the same, and One in God.

It all boils down to this...underneath our costumes, we are each actually only Love.

But...we get so busy living in our costumes, playing our roles, being that character, that we forget who we really are.  We are so good at it, in fact, that we've convinced ourselves that we actually really are our costumes.

Think of it like going to the movies.  The lights go out and if the movie is good, it becomes our world.  We are utterly lost in it.  It is everything to us for that brief ninety minutes or so.  We are completely consumed and we know nothing else.

Our lives here on earth are just like that.  We get caught up in the fantasy and we forget who we really are.

Drop the costumes to forgive--   Forgiving requires that we simply drop those costumes for a moment.  There is a larger part of us and it is not here in this silly playground of costumes.  We must back up for a moment and see both ourselves and our trespasser in our true states.  We must know that both of us are really only Love.  We are exactly the same and we are always One in God.

Forgiveness is the act of accepting that people come here to this 3D earth and put on a costume and do silly things.  They are deluded, they have simply forgotten who they really are.  When we forgive, we remember for them, who they really are.

We raise them up in our minds.  We know that they are really always with God, in God, One with God.  We see that truth.

Words for forgiveness:

You are Spirit,

Whole and Innocent,

I forgive you.

I release you.

I bless you with Love.  

I often start my forgiveness process with the words above.  But then I go deeper.  I have developed a set of words that walks me mentally through the process of seeing the higher truth for someone whom I am forgiving.  It takes me about five minutes to do this and when I am finished I am able to see anyone for who they really are.

And I really do mean anyone.  No matter how personally harmful or globally destructive their actions may seem, it is possible to shift your feelings about a trespasser from egoic fear feelings to those of Love.  

The words I use are in my book, Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness.  There is an entire chapter on this process.  If you'd like to be able to change your thinking, see through the costumes of this temporary world and focus on the bigger picture and the higher truth, I encourage you to get a copy of the book and practice this process for yourself.  You have only your happiness to gain. 

The Light Beyond the Body

In A Course in Miracles, the "Christ" Mind refers to that part in all of us that knows that it is the Son of God and chooses to think with love, rather than fear.

We are so much more than only bodies.  We are Mind.  We are connected through this mind.  We are Love.  We are Oneness, with each other and with our Creator.

Christ's vision has one law.  It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thought of guilt from dreams of sin.  It sees no separation.  And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees.  --A Course in Miracles, Lesson 158

In this passage from the Course, we are told to look beyond bodies.  God's real creation is our Minds, the Love we all share.  Every one of us was created in this Love.   It's telling us that bodies and earthly events are unimportant.  What's important is the Light of God that is a part of every one of us.

Thus are his sins forgiven him, for Christ has vision that has power to overlook them all.  In His forgiveness are they gone.  Unseen by One they merely disappear, because a vision of the Holiness that lies beyond them comes to take their place.  It matters not what form they took, nor how enormous they appeared to be, nor who seemed to be hurt by them.  They are no more.  And all effects they seemed to have are gone with them, undone and never to be done.  --A Course in Miracles, Lesson 158

When we look past bodies, we can forgive anything, because we see that the real truth is what is happening in the Mind, not here in this earthly 3D dream world.  And the truth of the real Mind is Love.

We're all here on earth having some adventures and learning some lessons, but where we really are, with God, none of this matters.  And in that real place, we love everyone and in fact, are joined with everyone.  

When you give unto another that which alone is true, because all minds are joined, you have offered unto them the only gift that holds value.  When you give another the truth--perhaps even without saying a word--because all minds are joined they recognize what has been offered and say to themselves, "The one before me knows the truth of me and is looking right through every one of my attempts to be less than who I am.  Therefore I see that it's safe to choose again."  That is when miracles occur.  --The Way of Mastery p. 86

When you look past the body and see only the light, you know the truth of even the worst villains.  Remember that this all happens on the level of the Mind, where thoughts are joined.  Knowing this truth, holds the place for them, in your mind.  And this gives them the chance to know your forgiveness.  You are giving them your love which is a chance for them to choose love for themselves.

Whether they do or not, is not your concern.  You get what you give.  Your forgiveness of others creates your own acceptance of yourself.  Self love.  It happens over time as you forgive others and the world around you.

Self love creates peace.  Peace leads to happiness.  This is how forgiveness is the key to happiness.