Laurie Learns What’s Possible

possibly create a totally new life. I happened to meet her while eating dinner before a workshop I was teaching at a retreat center near New
York. We talked about the courses I gave on personal change, and she immediately registered for my next class that August.
When Laurie came to her first event, she heard that it was absolutely possible to change your brain, your thoughts, your body, your emotional state, and your genetic expression. During the workshop, I talked about physical change, but Laurie’s beliefs about her disease and her body were tenacious and her emotions were stuck quite firmly in her past. She had absolutely no intention of healing her body, mostly because she didn’t really believe it was even possible. She came because she just wanted to feel better on the inside.
Laurie immediately applied the principles I taught as best she could,
even though she couldn’t seem to feel different by choice. The very first thing she did, almost immediately after that first weekend course, was to stop sharing her diagnosis with others. Even though she couldn’t control her emotions, she figured that she still had control over what she said out loud. So unless she needed to ask fora chair at a party or explain to a date why she couldn’t take a walk with him, she stopped acknowledging her condition altogether. Laurie chose to focus on where she was headed in her future toward a happy inner self, a deep connection to some unknown divine source, a wonderful job that she excelled at, a life partner, and close and healthy relationships with friends and relatives.
Laurie next concentrated on changing a few simple behaviors. She watched her thoughts and words, and reminded herself repeatedly to stop her old, repetitive, destructive patterns. She kept doing the meditations and taking my courses. In order to assign meaning to what she was doing,
she reread her class notes religiously and kept in touch with as many fellow students as she could. In time, some small but perceptible percentage of the day, Laurie felt better, taller, abler, and stronger. She’d say Change to herself 20 times a day, whenever she noticed her mind drifting to her past. Although negative thoughts sneaked through a hundred times a day, little by little, Laurie created a few new thoughts,
wrote them down, and attempted to believe them deeply.
Laurie worked hard at it, but it took almost two years before she could really feel those new thoughts. Instead of getting frustrated during that waiting period, Laurie reminded herself that it had taken quite along time to create the disease from her emotional state, so it might take sometime to uncreate it. She also reminded herself that she’d have to go through a biological, neurological, chemical, and genetic death of the old self before the new self emerged.
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The circumstances in her external environment got worse before they got better. A flood trashed Laurie’s home, and other situations in her apartment building created some new health problems. Laurie told me that every time she’d sit down to do her meditation and rehearse her ideal life, she felt as if she were telling herself a lie—and afterward,
opening her eyes to her current circumstances felt like a slap in the face. I
encouraged her to stop defining reality with her senses and to keep crossing the river of change.
Laurie kept limping into the workshops, grumpy at times and grateful at others, and she kept at the work. She also assembled as many local fellow students as she could to meditate together. Hardly any situations in Laurie’s life were pleasing, so she thought, What the hell, I may as well
have one hour a day behind my own eyelids where reality looks different,
where I have a pain-free body, a safe and quiet home, and a full and loving
relationship with the outside world and with my friends and family.
In early 2012, during one of my progressive workshops, Laurie had a significant deepening in her meditation experience. She was literally and
figuratively rocked to her core. Physically, it was like a disturbance and then a release. Her body shook, her face contorted, and her arms flew up as she tried her best to stay rooted to her chair. Emotionally, it was inexplicable joy. She cried, she laughed, and sounds came out of her mouth that she couldn’t explain. All of the fear and control that she’d previously used to hold herself together was finally loosening. For the first time, she felt a divine presence and knew she was no longer alone.
Laurie told me, I sensed something, someone, some divine presence,
and this consciousness wasn’t ignorant to my existence and unconcerned with my welfare, as I apparently previously believed. This consciousness has actually been paying attention. Realizing that was an overwhelming change for me All the energy she’d been putting into controlling her physical movements and her life in general finally began to relax and unwind, and the energy she’d been using to maintain that control started to free up.
At the next event, I noticed that Laurie was walking without a cane or any limp. She was happy, smiling, and laughing to herself, instead of irritated, frowning, and wincing in pain. She was transmuting fear into courage, frustration into patience, pain into joy, and weakness into strength. She was beginning to change—on the inside and the outside.
Free from the addiction of those limiting emotions, her body was now living less in the pastas she moved toward anew future.
In early spring of 2012, Laurie’s orthopedist told her during a regular checkup that about two-thirds of the length of a fracture she’d had in her
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femur since she was 19 (a fracture that had shown upon everyone of the hundred or so x-rays she’d had so far) had vanished. He had no explanation too er but, instead, suggested she begin riding a stationary bicycle at the gym for ten minutes, twice a week. The message was music to Laurie’s ears, and off she went.

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