Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (47 page)

Say affirmations with your whole heart, as though what you’re affirming were true right now, and your electromagnetic field and heart will send out messages that begin to attract to you the very things you are now vibrating. You probably affirm things all the time but don’t realize it. Think about how many times you say, “I am” during a day. What are you affirming when you say that? Do you really want the universe reflecting “I am so overwhelmed” or “I am screwing this up”? No, you want the universe to reflect your affirmation that “I am flourishing! I am a joyful, ageless goddess!” The original name for Spirit is “I AM”: Spirit is the power of intention to create something new.

Spirituality requires being present and mindful. Mindfulness practices support agelessness and health—and they are ways to commune with the Divine as well. Mindful meditation or breathing, and mindful partner dancing or other activities where you have to be fully present and aware of what is happening in the moment, are a few forms of mindfulness practice, but there are many. Mindfulness isn’t something you have to take a course in. You just have to get out of your head and your anxiety and worries that you’re not good enough. Forget that. If you’re meditating and realize your mind has been wandering, laugh at it and pull your focus back to your breath or your mantra. Every time you replace judgment with a return to being present right now, you get better at keeping your mind from drifting away from your control. Don’t worry that you weren’t mindful when you can simply be mindful again.

SYMBOLS AND RITUALS

Ritual and symbol are powerful because they bypass the intellect and give us a direct line to the Divine through our own goddess
selves. I use ritual constantly. I often do new moon and full moon rituals with my friends, using free conference calls to connect if we can’t be together. I light candles, and then I call in the four directions and Archangel Michael and his Legions of Light. I call on Power Animals that protect those four directions. I cut cords, say prayers, and invoke Divine Love. I smudge spaces with burning sage to cleanse the energy. I say Divine Beloved prayers, asking to be changed into someone who is already where I want to be. My rituals are alive and in the moment. I make them up as I go along. The late Peter Calhoun talked about being a priest who performed rituals that he came to realize had become rote, dry, and meaningless for him and the people participating in his church. But when he began to work with living energies of nature, and with the unseen, things began to change. Then he was really able to help people instead of just repeating tired old homilies passed down through the generations. (It’s okay to use traditional words, but only if you infuse them with life!) We are programmed to respond to rituals that take place in natural areas or use natural objects. These rituals remind us of our connection to the great Mother Earth. Let the sun and the breeze bring energy in!

Rituals don’t have to be perfect to be meaningful and powerful. The universe won’t zap you with a lightning bolt if you don’t say the words correctly or your smudge stick burns out and needs to be relit. I have a friend who liked doing rituals with a neopagan group, but they kept getting upset with her because her dyslexia inevitably made her turn “widdershins” (counterclockwise) instead of “sunward” (clockwise). Then she’d mumble, “Sorry!” as she stepped into the circle awkwardly to turn herself around, which broke the rules about keeping the container of sacred space intact. And then she’d start in the west instead of the east to call upon the four directions and stifle a fit of nervous giggling. In fact, there is nothing more Divine than laughing at yourself!

THE LAUGHING BUDDHA

In many religions, there’s no symbol or story about humor and laughter as ways to raise your vibration and feel more connected to others and to God. In Buddhism, there’s the Laughing
Buddha with his big, round belly and huge grin reminding us that God is laughter as well as love. Spirituality and irreverence aren’t often seen as compatible, but truly spiritual people aren’t self-conscious, grim, or judgmental. The Dalai Lama giggles all the time. However, many of us have been brought up to be far too serious when it comes to spirituality, religion, and God. More than that, we’ve been brought up to think that someone else has the answers for us and we don’t. We’re deadly serious about our gurus. And by the way, there’s a marvelously funny documentary about the tendency to look outside of ourselves to someone else to guide us:
Kumaré: The True Story of a False Prophet.
This story of a man who was looking for a guru and decided to become one—and developed a devoted following almost by accident—is a great reminder that our connection with the Divine is always an inside job. And that the guru is you.

Stop waiting to be “worthy” of indulging your desire for joy, connection, and pleasure. You’re already worthy, so get on with it. And cut out the harsh, ugly stimulation that brings you down. These days, you can be just about anywhere on the planet and take out a mobile device and access information. Do you need to know about every horror that is happening around the globe, in real time, 24/7? For some reason, we’ve become convinced that we’re bad people if we don’t pay attention to every gory detail of human and animal suffering. We now have the ability to be connected all day and all night with the entire planet, but we have to be very mindful about what we give our attention to—suffering or healing and flourishing. Over time, the images, thoughts, and emotions we experience are programming our biology.

Stop replaying that traumatic image, whether you’re watching it on a screen or in your mind. Otherwise, you’ll get stuck in a milder form of PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. This debilitating condition involves a nervous system that’s become overreactive and causes a person to reexperience a trauma as if in real time, with the heart racing, the cortisol shooting through the bloodstream, and the eyes dilating as fear takes over the body. The body and nervous system don’t know that the danger has passed—and the stress you experience while you’re reliving the past wreaks havoc on your body. You can honor the past and its tragedies without putting your body and spirit through all of that
trauma and stress again. We can be compassionate without reliving someone else’s trauma as they replay the video over and over. Say this prayer when you realize you’re falling back into the old habit of taking in too much negativity or reliving a trauma from the past: “Divine Beloved, please change me into one who knows how to focus on the positive. Change me into someone who easily shifts my focus from the negative to the positive. Show me how to do this.”

The human body and its nervous system have not evolved to tolerate the onslaught of bad news and emotionally traumatizing information and images that are part and parcel of mainstream news. Focusing only on doom and gloom is neither an accurate depiction of reality nor a healthy practice. Remember that for every terribly depressing news story, there is an uplifting one. The good is just as real as murder, assault, kidnapping, or war.

And believe me, once you start looking for the good, you will see it everywhere. Shift your focus now. Limit the amount of negative news coming into your consciousness. Look for good news, uplifting ideas, and reminders that people are looking out for each other and the earth and her creatures. As a daily spiritual practice, laugh often and look for the magic of everyday life. Understand that the more joyful you feel, the more you will uplift the entire world. Joy and laughter replenish you at a cellular level, so go for the comedy in life, not the tragedy.

As you deepen your connection to the Divine, you will find you see life differently. The little things won’t bother you so much, and your anxiety and perfectionism will start to fade as you relax into trusting in Divine Order. Here’s a cultural norm to replace: living your life as an emergency. I was trained as a doctor to be “on call” at all times, vigilant about every disaster that might befall a patient. This was not in keeping with the prayer “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” which I learned as a child. Life on earth ought to be heavenly. Heaven shouldn’t be experienced only after death, and then, only if you’re a good girl. You are a divine goddess. Bring heaven to earth now, through your heart, your hips, and your sheer joy. Get rid of the old ideas about your relationship with Spirit and step into an embrace with the Divine Beloved, whose kiss awaits you.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE 14-DAY AGELESS GODDESS PROGRAM

Old age is the only disease you can
catch by imitating its symptoms.

— M
ARIO
E. M
ARTINEZ
, P
SY
. D.

W
hen I was in medical school, a professor showed us a slide of the dendrites that branched off from individual neurons in the brain. Each neuron had dozens of dendritic connections for communication between different brain cells. To make the connections visible, a golden orange-yellow stain was used on the brain tissue. Against the background, the dendrites appeared black. As I sat in the dark lecture hall, I was taken aback by the sheer beauty of the image on the projector screen. It resembled a tree late in autumn, branching outward to connect with other branches on other trees. Like trees, our minds and bodies are always growing and expanding, forming new connections between thoughts, ideas, activities, and
experiences. Our minds, bodies, and organs are formed and constantly remodeled every day. The quality of these connections—which we can change at any age—has everything to do with what we believe and how we behave.

To maintain and even enhance your physical well-being, your attitude, and your experience of life—all of which are core to agelessness—you have to be connected to your life force. Creativity, joy, prosperity, pleasure, lushness, love, and faith are all part of being ageless. Each is both an emotional state and a biochemical reality that results in the free flow of life energy throughout the body. Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work has documented how thinking thoughts with enough amplitude (as measured by EEGs) literally changes the neural connections in our brains. Modern brain-scanning techniques have documented beyond a shadow of a doubt how powerful our minds are to, quite literally, change and heal our bodies—and our lives. What we refer to as “faith” translates into the amount of time and intention it takes for new nerve cell connections to form from new habits of thought. That intention and that desire are what you must tap within yourself to become an ageless goddess. (These astonishing neural pattern changes are beautifully documented in Dispenza’s TEDx talk—which is well worth watching.)

So now that you’ve learned about the power of your mind, heart, and spirit to transform your body and transcend outdated cultural portals about age, the question is, how are you going to incorporate into your life practices that contribute to agelessness? What do you need to do to allow your true goddess self to emerge and flourish? In other words, what will it take for you to become happy, healthy, energized, and ageless? How are you going to apply the ideas in this book to your life right now?

Remember that to find answers, you start by looking within. What do
you
know about what you have to do to be ageless? Physicians, healers, diagnostic tests, and checklists are all valuable tools, but becoming an ageless goddess means letting go of the fear that you aren’t smart enough, educated enough, or intuitive enough to make the right decisions for yourself. If you’re reading this, you have what it takes to be in charge of your health and work effectively with the tools and resources available to you.
What do you most need to do to begin living agelessly instead of in fear of aging?