When are you?
The Practice:
Enjoy now.
Why?
There’s a profound and miraculous mystery right under our noses: this instant of now has no duration at all, yet somehow it contains all the causes from the past that are creating the future. Everything arising to become this moment vanishes beneath our feet as the next moment wells up. Since it’s always now, now is eternal.
If you happen to watch the news or glance at social media, you might experience a tiny quiver of uncertainty every now and again. Do you ever worry about your future? Is there a part of your life where it seems like the well of abundance is running dry? If you answered yes, keep reading and discover eight ways to experience limitless energetic gain in your life.
Abundance is an awareness of all the possibilities that are available to each of us. This mindset has a deep faith in something greater than the physical world and logical limitations. Abundance is also believing in miracles and the unseen.
There is a creative state of confusion that is incredibly special: bewilderment. Ordinary confusion bothers us because people find it hard to live with uncertainty. Stress is increased if you don’t know what’s going to happen next. But instead of being an anxious state like ordinary confusion, bewilderment is the exact opposite: it leads to creativity, wonder and awe. If you are really bewildered, you will experience bliss.
Surprisingly, the answer was provided over 400 years ago, by the cofounder of the Jesuit order, St. Francis Xavier. The truth was expressed in his famous quote: “Give me a child for the first seven years, and I’ll give you the man.” Xavier was aware of the fact that life-controlling behavioral programs, downloaded into a child’s subconscious mind during its first seven years, will shape the character of the rest of that person’s life experiences. While our personal wishes, desires and aspirations are a product of the conscious mind, 95% of life experiences are controlled by behavioral activity programmed into the subconscious mind.
Remember, Nature spends a lot of effort and energy in creating a child, and it doesn’t do so randomly or just on a whim. Nature wants to ensure that a child is going to be successful in its life before embarking on the process of birthing that child. Although a child receives genes from both its mother and father, the genes are not fully set into the position of activation until the process of development. The first eight weeks of a child’s development is called the embryo phase, and that’s just a mechanical unfolding of genes to make sure the baby has a body with two arms, two legs, two eyes, etc. The next period of life is called the fetal stage, when the embryo has the human configuration. Since it’s already shaped, the question is, what will nature do to modify or adjust this human in the next number of months before it’s born? What it does is this: Nature reads the environment and then adjusts the final tuning of the genetics of the child based on what’s immediately going on in the world. How can nature read the environment and do this? The answer is that the mother and the father become nature’s Head Start program. They’re the ones who are living in and experiencing the environment. Their perceptions of the world are then transmitted to the child.
We used to think that only nutrition was provided by the mother to a developing child. The story was, genes control the development, and the mother just provides nutrition. We now know, of course, that there’s more than just nutrition in blood. Blood contains information about emotions and regulatory hormones and the growth factors that control the mother’s life in the world in which she’s living. All this information passes into the placenta along with nutrition. If the mother is happy, the fetus is happy because the same chemistry of emotions that affect the mother’s system are crossing into the fetus. If the mother is scared or stressed, the same stress hormones cross and adjust the fetus. What we’re recognizing is that, through a concept called epigenetics, the environmental information is used to select and modify the genetic program of the fetus so it will conform to the environment in which it’s going to grow, thus enhancing the survival of the child. If parents are totally unaware, this creates a great problem—they don’t know that their attitudes and responses to their experiences are being passed on to their child.
The good news is once you become aware of where you are struggling in your life, you have an opportunity to define the limiting dysfunctional subconscious programs that are inhibiting your efforts! The profoundly important fact is disempowering subconscious programs can be rewritten using techniques such as self-hypnosis, habituation practices, and a number of new modalities collectively referred to as “energy psychology.”
I’m the first to admit that I wasn’t ready to be a parent and that I was ignorant about the importance of parents (versus genes) in child development. With 20/20 hindsight, there are many things as a father I’d like to go back and change. Now when I see my daughters and sons-in-law raising their children consciously, in a way that means that these children, unlike their grandfather, won’t have to rewrite a lot of negative programming, I wonder how I could have been so ignorant. I’m reminded of Bharat Mitra’s description of organic farming, which could also serve as a description of conscious parenting: “How beautiful. How natural. How simple.”
Once the subconscious mind is reprogrammed, replacing limiting beliefs with your personal wishes and desires, the subconscious mind working 95% of the day will get you to your destination unconsciously, without the necessity of applying any conscious effort. Does this really work? For over 40 years, I was truly working “hard,” yet failing, to achieve happiness and a true loving relationship. Twenty-seven years ago, I employed these scientific insights to rewrite my dysfunctional developmental programs. How did that work out? For the last 25 years, I have been blessed to truly manifest a joyous Heaven-on-Earth life experience with my wonderful partner Margaret.
For details on how to create the life you desire, I invite you to check-out the www.brucelipton.com website which offers a large number of freely available written articles, podcasts, and videos, revealing how you can reprogram and empower your life. The Honeymoon Effect book is a source that illuminates the molecular pathways connecting the mind and the body and offers an understanding of how to create and sustain a “Heaven-on-Earth” experience in every aspect of our lives. If you are interested in learning more about conscious parenting and birth psychology, please see the resources we have listed HERE, including the Nature, Nurture, and the Power of Love DVD.
With these insights, I wish for you a life of Health, Happiness, Harmony, and of course, LOVE.
With Love and Light,
Bruce
There is no more important question than the following: Is Nature on the side of human beings? If you answer immediately without a second thought, your answer is very likely to be no. The reasons behind the answer are emotional—the power of the weather, just to mention one force of Nature, is terrifying in its might. Someone with a scientific bent would support a “no” with two plausible arguments. The first argument is that natural forces operate at random and have done so for 13.8 billion years, the current estimate for the age of the cosmos.
Often there are very subtle threads that hold us to life and to the belief that everything is ultimately worthwhile. They reveal themselves in sometimes overlooked daily details: the smell of freshly baked bread from the kitchen, the way the sun highlights the red amaryllis on the dining room table, a snatch of song from a neighbor’s apartment. All these make up life’s tapestry and fill us with delight if we are able to fully receive them. They balance out any sadness or dismay about how things are unfolding and uplift us at the most unexpected moments. This is the magic of allowing your life to carry you to the heart of all experience: Heavenly gifts are always arriving.
Vacillations in how we feel are part of life, particularly now as the planet lives through a pandemic. We have unexpectedly come face to face with potential illness and mortality, as well as the relative shortness of one lifetime. It can shake our emotional foundations. Yet, wherever we are on the timeline of life, most of us gradually reach some kind of resolution. We come to terms with life and death. The wisdom of the ages reaches into our souls and awakens awareness. We realize time is an illusion and if we don’t fully immerse ourselves in “now,” we miss both the mundane and spiritual impacts of life. This is the soul’s journey, right now being played out on a world canvas, as we pass from dawn to dusk and finally see the full illumination of midday (or the “present moment”).
Have you found yourself rolling through life expecting the same thing day after day? Maybe you have forgotten how to anticipate and allow new opportunities in your world. Keep reading and discover what playful energy is and how it can change your life.
One of my favorite tools for quick inspiration is getting outside, preferably on a hiking trail. I do this because I love the sense of freedom, and expansion of playful energy. It clears my mind and brings me joy.
This morning was no exception. I left my house at sunrise, with my four-legged trail companion. As we climbed up into the valley, we could see hot air balloons in the distance. A couple minutes later, a coyote with a stunning coat of reds, browns and white colors, met us on the trail. He paused, and looked at us before he dropped off into a ravine.
For many years I had a garden filled with a variety of flowers in our yard in Massachusetts. After we moved to Florida, I created a smaller “garden” of potted flowers on our lanai. Now, back home in the Boston area, the backyard we share with our downstairs neighbors really has no room for a garden like my previous one. Instead, I have begun taking long walks through the neighborhoods of our town to delight in other people’s gardens. I have found this to be an unexpected gift of my return to New England. I loved having my own garden, but now I am enjoying the entire town’s gardens, as well as those at nearby Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Suddenly, the whole world has become a garden—or I am realizing it always was.
We have all felt moments of loneliness in life.
That sense of feeling disconnected to yourself, those around you and nature. It’s painful to feel that you are the only one going through your experience, or that no one understands your pain.
The truth is that you are not alone. There are millions of people around the world going through what you are and feeling similar emotions this very second. There are billions of people in the past that have as well.
We may seem different on the surface in terms of religion, skin color, political beliefs, but at our core we all share the same humanity, the same desires, the same fear, concerns and pain.
We all want to love and be loved.
When stuck in the feeling of loneliness, take a look and see if you are obsessing about yourself. This creates a sense of feeling disconnected from all those around you.
The loneliness may also be a signal about certain things in your life that aren’t working which you need to pay attention to and change.
What is it that you might need to change?
One of the great failures in science is still haunting us, the failure to discover why living things are alive. One of the most promising theories was known as vitalism, which held that some undiscovered “life force” or “spark of life” is what separates living things like trees, cats, and amoebas from non-living things like rocks, water, and salt. Vitalism was once so promising that the Nobel Prize was given to a champion of vitalism, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, in 1927. But significantly, the prize was in literature, since no one, however enamored of vitalism, could provide scientific evidence for any kind of life force.
The tables were decisively turned to the opposite of vitalism, known as functionalism, which breaks life down into processes like metabolism, growth, reproduction, adaptation, evolution and extinction.. That’s where we find ourselves today, which poses a huge problem. Vitalism and functionalism are opposites, which implies that in the game of either/or, if one is false, the other must be true. But unfortunately, functionalism doesn’t explain life, either. It explains how life behaves, which isn’t the same thing.
My second chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer took place on 2 Qanil in the Maya calendar. The sacred symbol Qanil stands for “the seed that generates life and creation.” For me, a perfect analogy, because I envisioned life’s seeds of light and love being transmitted to me via the infusions, at the same time that I felt them radiating out from me in my own vibration. This is the circular process of God creating God in the world. We each embody God in our physical forms, and God experiences life through our experiences. As we create, or express our soul selves, God is creating simultaneously. The entire universe is a divinely designed participatory symphony of living light and love. I feel this almost continuously now.
Life is Fantastic! Nature is teaching us in every way. Just this morning I saw the most beautiful rainbow, between the clouds of rain. Life is fantastic and I am so happy. I don’t need to justify it, or apologize for it. I am just happy. And, I think what’s keeping you from being happy too, is the fact you feel it’s not okay to be happy. As much as you want to be happy and want to feel a sense of joy everyday and feel a sense of vibrancy and aliveness, you won’t let yourselves have it because it’s raining in everyone else’s reality while you’re living in the world of rainbows.
You need to realize that people are exactly where they are, just as you are where you are. It’s time you write yourself a happy permission slip. Where you would ordinarily pretend to be miserable, or pretend to not be happy by dimming down your happiness in the presence of other people, I want you to not be afraid of being happy.
“On a clear day, you can see forever.”—Burton Lane
Several years ago, after a somewhat worrisome eye diagnosis, I had the extraordinary experience of looking out my window and seeing the external world moving in perfect synchronicity to the Andrea Bocelli music I was listening to. Every detail—people walking, cars passing, tree leaves in the wind—was part of a divinely choreographed dance of deeply connected oneness. And I too was part of it. There was nothing in the universe that sat alone on the sidelines within God’s creation. And I could see this so clearly that the power and beauty of it moved me to tears. Infinity vision, beyond an eye diagnosis.
Since no one wants to age, there is a tremendous incentive to prevent, slow down or even reverse it. But all these efforts run into the same obstacle. No one actually knows what aging is or precisely what causes it. On its face, this riddle shouldn’t exist. The universe is subject to entropy, which causes everything, including the universe itself, to run down like a child’s toy whose battery slowly runs down. Biology chimes in with the obvious fact that all higher living things grow old and die.
But reality changes depending on your viewpoint, and one viewpoint tells us that aging, especially human aging, could be a mistake. First, we need to counter the evidence that living things must grow old and die. This is more easily done than you might suppose. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the counter-argument against aging.
It’s sweater weather! Get outside with a pumpkin spice latte and enjoy the crisp fall air. Whether you have little ones and are looking for family activities or you want creative ways to stay busy with the days getting shorter, here are nine healthy outdoor activities to enjoy this autumn.
Raking up leaves might sound like a chore, but it's also a fantastic workout. Effortlessly elevate your heart rate by raking quickly. You'll be feeling the burn in your obliques and forearms for days. Get your kiddos involved by having them help rake for a bit, and then reward them with jumping in piles.
| In 1967, I was learning the technique of growing cells in plastic culture dishes at the University of Virginia. There are two fundamental steps in the process: Step 1) Creating a suspension of isolated single cells to be inoculated into a culture dish; and Step 2) Creating culture medium, the fluid environment in which cells grow. |
| Starting with embryonic muscle tissue, digestive enzymes are used to breakdown the connective tissue matrix of the muscle, which frees individual cells. In the enzyme-saline solution, the released free cells are spun down in a centrifuge tube forming a pellet at the bottom of tube. The cell pellet is resuspended in fresh culture medium and a sample is pipetted into each culture dish. The suspended cells settle down, attach to dish’s surface, and begin to grow. The cultured cells live in a fluid environment referred to as culture medium. Growth medium is the laboratory version of blood, the fluid environment that cells live in within the body.
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The nonstop noise of the external world often keeps us from experiencing the quiet at the core of our being. There, a timeless eternal presence without sound or language awaits us, a connection to something greater than our individual, seemingly short lives. Outer distractions, both audio and visual, continuously surround us from our TVs, laptops, and cell phones and prevent a deeper relationship to all of life. Traffic sounds, machinery, and loud voices in nonstop conversation interrupt our peace of mind, even if we don’t consciously recognize the dissonance. Yet, something within each of us does know something is amiss and longs for an absence of sound within which we can feel calmer, more centered. How do we get there?
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“This kind of spring day, with the beautiful myriads of colorful sprites just arrived from tropical shores, has to be one of the greatest gifts on Earth.”—Kenn Kaufman Inevitably, people ask me why I moved from Florida back to Massachusetts after only two and a half years. I answer a little differently each time, usually something about missing friends/family and the change of seasons. However, as spring begins to flower in New England, there is one answer that rises to the top: the birds! Meaning the spring bird migration that brings thousands of birds from Central and South America northward through Massachusetts. And right down the street from me to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, which is heaven on Earth for birdwatchers from April to June, especially the first three weeks in May. With the exception of the last two years, this is where I could be found early in the morning to mid-afternoon on most spring days over the past 30 years.
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Sometimes when I’m out for a walk in the woods with Koda, I see a box turtle trudging forward through the leaves. Don’t you love turtles? I was always taught that if you see any turtles in the middle of the road, you should try to stop and put them on the side of the road where they’re headed. You must also pick them up carefully and try not to handle them too much. You can use a t-shirt or towel to lift and move them away from the traffic. As I watched this turtle during my walk, I thought about how connected we are to these amazing creatures and how many lessons they can teach us. Here are a few that came to mind.
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