Sorry folks, but this blog is not about ‘neck massagers’.  Although a little ‘O’ therapy certainly couldn’t hurt 😉

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Gospel of John 1:1.  Nice switch, huh?

Despite 17 years of Catholic education, I had no clue what this meant until recently.  Then it all started to come together.  We are electro-magnetic beings.  What appears in our life is a direct result of what we think, we feel and we SAY.  God created the Universe through word: “and the word became flesh.”  Word is sound vibration.  Everything in the Universe vibrates.  Just two weeks ago physicists were elated to discover the smoking gun of the Big Bang Theory…gravitational waves, a concept put forth by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago. The best evidence to date to support the Big Bang Theory is, in fact, a vibration.

At our core we are energy.  I know that it seems like we and the world around us are pretty solid but, as Mark Mincolla pointed out in his latest book Whole Health, we are 99.999% energy and only 0.001% matter.  The shape of matter (me, you, an apple, a tree) is a response to vibration.  When we think a thought, a sound vibration goes out.  We are literally capable of thinking ourselves into wellness or illness, abundance or lack.  The most advanced medical tests available (MRIs, EKGs, EEGs) all measure energy vibration in the body.  I don’t claim to be a quantum physicist and you don’t need to be one to get this.  The reason this topic is so important to me is because before 2010 I was entirely clueless about how energy was driving the course of my life…in a disastrous direction.  My hope is to spread the word so that you can harness the energy to work for you rather than against you.  You have this power.  We all do.

The Universe does not reward us or punish us.  What we experience is not random or accidental.   What we experience is a reflection of what we most often repeat as thoughts, feelings and words about ourselves, our life conditions and what we are ‘entitled’ to. We are powerful creators.   The Universe is always lining up to deliver to us exactly what we are asking for.  How many times have you thought of someone and then run into them that very day?  Or you hear about something or someone for the first time and then you find that everywhere you go their name is mentioned?  These are everyday examples of us emitting a vibration and the Universe responding in kind.  As I became more aware of energy as the driving force in my life these “synchronicities” popped up more and more.  If you vibrate the mentality of lack, that is exactly what you will experience.  If you vibrate that you are abundant, you’ll get it.  If you vibrate fear that because you have the BRCA 1 gene you will get breast cancer, you have just taken a giant step in the direction of breast cancer becoming a part of your reality.  What we think with the most frequency, we become.  A lot of this is done at a subconscious level.  We all know the expression ‘she’s on a roll”.  Once you get something good going, you can be unstoppable. You are in the vibration of it.   It happens all the time in sports right?  Hot streaks and cold streaks?  Did the player’s skill level suddenly spike or plummet?  Or did that inner dialogue (vibration) shift?  How about the woman who desperately wants to get pregnant and is doing everything she can to make this happen yet she still doesn’t conceive.  She is vibrating on what she doesn’t have, attracting more of that to her life.  The Universe isn’t punishing her, it is responding to the vibration she is predominantly putting out.  Then she decides to adopt, she releases the need to get pregnant and voila, she gets pregnant.  It happens a lot.

In our desire to control our lives we often emit a vibration of fear.  So guess what I thought a lot about leading up to my cancer diagnosis?  Yeah, you guessed it…’cancer’.  I thought a lot about it.  Once my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009, I got to work researching everything I could find (I didn’t know about holistic therapies yet) about healing stage IV lung cancer.  When I hit brick walls, which of course I did because stage IVs don’t heal conventionally, I researched risk factors for developing lung cancer.  I am a former smoker.  I smoked about a half a pack a day in my 20s, more on the weekends.  My dad’s diagnosis made me not only incredibly sad but also scared at a subconscious level.  Deep down I started to do the math, ‘if I smoked 10 cigarettes per day for 10 years, how much does that raise my risk of developing lung cancer now that my father has lung cancer?  How many years of not smoking will it take to reduce my risk of cancer to the level of the non-smoking population?  I did these calculations and thought about it often, when I wasn’t trying to help my dad to survive.  Cancer was on the brain…pun intended 😉

A couple of years ago, a registered nurse was giving me reiki (energy healing) at Dana Farber. It was the one resource available to me at DF that I utilized.  I had always suspected that the trauma of my dad’s illness had contributed to my own but I didn’t understand how.  I had also known individuals and families who seemed like magnets for unfortunate events.  What this RN told me has stayed with me.  She said that among all the cancer patients she treated, at least 50% had experienced a traumatic shock, loss or event in the 3 years preceding their diagnosis.  From recent memory, Joe Paterno (former head coach of the Penn State football team) comes to mind.  Paterno was under scrutiny in 2011 for what he knew about the child sex abuse being carried out by his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.  Paterno decided to resign but was fired by the Penn State Board of Trustees in November 2011.  His son announced that he had lung cancer that same month.  Not only is this indicative of the effects of trauma on the body but when you understand the emotions behind cancer (deep seated grief or secret eating away at the body) the connection is pretty hard to ignore.  Joe Paterno passed away in early 2012.  I bet if you think about this statistic you know at least one person for whom this fits the bill, and those are only the traumas that are public. Many of us have emotional traumas that we bury deep down.  You may be able to shield them from the public but you can’t hide them from yourself.  As I developed more understanding of the mind/body connection this link became more evident.  I became friends with a woman on Facebook, Ginger Rollins, who healed herself of a grade III-IV brain tumor.  This is a nasty, fast-moving brain tumor.  Her oncologist told her she had six months to live.  Just to reiterate, this woman cured herself of an ‘incurable’ brain tumor.  She did have surgery, she started chemo but stopped after 3 weeks because her intuition told her to, but she did complete radiation.  She declined the 15 months of chemo that the doctors recommended and instead turned to natural healing methods.  Her story can be found on www.ChrisBeatCancer.com.  She recommended a book that she said was a must for anyone going through cancer called The Cancer Report.  I bought it.  The Cancer Report contains the findings of medical doctors, scientists, psychotherapists, cancer survivors, other healthcare professionals and holistic institutes.  It is a compilation of more than 30 years of research with over 70,000 cancer patients.

I had no idea when I bought it that it would so thoroughly confirm my beliefs about our thoughts and feelings so radically impacting our lives.  The book is broken into chapters devoted to 10 or so different health professional’s natural approaches to successfully treating cancer.  Every single one, EVERY SINGLE ONE, reiterated the ‘cancer personality’.  This is the psychology of the person who gets cancer.  One of the trademarks is a trauma preceding diagnosis.  Now admittedly, this is the only characteristic that was not universal to all patients, but so prominent that each professional included it in their list of risk factors.  I think this is why I am so bothered that conventional oncology stops at DNA mutations in the ‘search for a cure’.  DNA mutation is a part of the cycle but shouldn’t the question be ‘why is the DNA of some individuals mutating and why is their immune system unable to effectively deal with it?’ Our emotional health is just as vital as our physical health and completely interconnected.  To heal, it’s imperative to treat the body, mind and soul because disease starts as a thought (vibration pattern).

So how does this relate to you and your life experience?  Well, our thoughts, feelings and words don’t just impact our susceptibility to disease but also shape the experiences of our lives.  Nikola Tesla, the inventor of the radio, said “if you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”   So I discovered a simple but profound truth, if the Universe is energy and I am energy, the process of changing something in my life that I no longer want to experience becomes about changing my vibration.  To change my outward circumstances I need to be tuning myself to the right vibration to get what I want, just like a radio transmitter and receiver.  If I want classic rock, tuning into the country station won’t get me there.  I need to change the station.

Brain activity for most of us is scattered at best….me especially.  Changing that activity to a vibration that matches what we want rather than what is distracting us is the goal.  In order to understand this, it’s helpful to know just a bit about brainwaves.  The human brain, like the rest of the human body, vibrates at a frequency measured in hertz similarly to sound waves.  The brain emits 5 types of energy waves (gamma, beta, alpha, theta, and delta).

• Gamma brainwaves are the most recently discovered and the fastest frequency. While little is known about this state of mind, initial research shows Gamma waves are associated with peak concentration and feelings of being blessed.
• Beta brainwaves are associated with normal waking consciousness.
• Alpha brainwaves are present in deep relaxation, usually when the eyes are closed, during a light meditation or what my grandmother called ‘just resting my eyes’.
• Theta brainwaves are the stuff of transformation.  I have read that young children spend a lot of time in this state and now that I have experienced this through meditation, I can honestly say that I remember this state as a child.  Theta is the realm of the subconscious and is usually only experienced momentarily as we drift off to sleep from Alpha and wake from deep sleep (Delta).  Theta is where we have immense power to create our reality. It is also where the mind’s deep-seated programs are accessed.  At this frequency, we are conscious of our surroundings however our bodies are in deep relaxation.
• Delta brainwaves are the slowest of the frequencies and are experienced in deep, dreamless sleep and in very deep, transcendental meditation.

So theta is where transformation takes place, and changing the vibration here to match what we want rather than what is distracting us is the goal but how do we get there?  Well, I worked on this a lot over the last 3 years.  I tried positive affirmations, looking at the bright side etc…  What I found and what I think accounts for my critical breakthrough of the last few months were 2 things.  First, I let go of my need to control the process of healing and of life unfolding, frankly because by attempting to control it I was always thinking about what I didn’t have thus keeping away what I actually wanted!  Second, I also finally had my meditation breakthrough.  Meditation helps you to be present and focused on your vibration.  Now I’m sure some of you have tried meditating.  I bet some of you are pros.  I think meditation comes very naturally to some.  I am so not one of those people!!!  My mind is a swirling vortex of ideas (some great, some ridiculous), useless trivia, day to day responsibilities yada yada yada.   I cannot tell you how many times I have been with a highly intuitive person who tells me that my mind is very ‘active’.  This is NOT meant as a compliment!  I meditated for more than a year with absolutely no luck.  Yes, I got quiet in my chair, I chanted my ohms, I lit candles, etc…the most I got was a little rest.  Last fall I finally found a 10 minute theta brainwaves meditation that allowed me to reach an altered state of consciousness.  That changed everything.

But I don’t want it to take that long for you.  I have a short cut for all you totally and thoroughly intimidated by meditation.  I want to tell you about Paul Santisi.  Paul Santisi has created some exceptionally powerful suggestion meditations.  He is what I would call a regular guy who just happens to understand how our vibration dictates our reality.  I have probably tried well over 200 guided or music meditations in addition to simple quiet.  Paul Santisi’s meditations work better than anything else for me.  Does that mean it will be perfect for you?  No.  But they are free on YouTube and I suspect if you give it a chance you will be able to actually feel your body vibrating at a higher frequency.  His meditations are typically about 1 hour and 10 minutes.   I know that seems long but maybe we all should be giving our mind a bit more love.  Most of us live on autopilot.  We have filled calendars.  To experience the life that you desire, you must be present in the present.  If you are thinking about what happened yesterday or worrying or planning what will happen tomorrow you are not in the present.  No peace can be found by dwelling in the past or the future.  In the present, you can direct your vibration, which will alter your future.   My favorite Paul Santisi meditation is the 3D version of “I AM”, although Mind Silence and Expectation are great too.  The I AM meditation is Stuart Smalley on steroids.  Since I started listening, I have tapped into my confidence and have watched challenging situations melt away.   Does this mean I am experiencing bliss in every moment of my day?  Nope.  But I am making huge strides in that direction.  More than anything, I have witnessed my fear and worry knee jerk responses nearly vanish.  That is pretty incredible coming from someone with an ‘incurable’ disease 😉  Imagine what it can do for you.

Please listen with headphones to the entire recording, lie down and get comfy and allow this audio cheerleading magic to transform you.  I recommend setting your alarm for an hour early in the a.m., grabbing your headphones, lying back down and listening as you snooze or listening right before bed.   The I AM meditation helps you to be present in your true creative power.  That feeling will begin to carry over to your beta consciousness (alert state).  Watch how you stop reacting to situations that before got you riled up and instead observe reality around you from a place of ‘imperturbability’ – perhaps my favorite word ever.  Raise your vibration from one of frenetic activity, worry and fear to one of confidence, calmness and peace and witness your life transformed before your eyes.

In case you’re curious, the image attached to this post is of sand that is being exposed to high vibrational sound. The sand shifts into beautiful geometric patterns as the vibration changes.  The science is called Cymatics.  There are some amazing videos out there demonstrating what sound vibration does to matter.  If it does this to sand, imagine what it is doing to our bodies.