MOOD, FOOD AND GRATITUDE

Acknowledgments I wish to personally thank the following people and organizations for their contributions to my inspiration, experience, knowledge, and other loving assistance in creating this book: First and foremost, I would like to thank my editor and confidante, Heather Doyle Fraser, for her expertise and support. You understood the depth of the material and my dedication to telling the bold truth. Deep down, there are no words. I’d also like to give special thanks to Hilda Doyle, my amazing illustrator and the one who reminded me that Heather is an editor. If it weren’t for Katarina Van Derham, my dear friend and editor-in-chief of Viva Glam Magazine, I wouldn’t have the vast readership that comes with a weekly column, “Great Mind.” Thank you, Katarina, for putting together a most exceptional magazine, for your unending support, and for the freedom to write about energy, love, and truth. I love you dearly. xoxo Great job to my copy editor and close friend, Dawn Allen, Thank you, my sista! I’d like to thank my family and best pals—Pookie and Buster (my four-legged kids), Mom, Kel, Kev, Terri, Casey, Lindsey, Bri, Jason, Chirila, Sarah, Riggs (Dude), and my neighborhood family for understanding that I couldn’t join you at most functions for the past six years, because I was writing this book. Thank you for your loyalty, support, and love! Thank you, Lisa Noland, aka Ruby, for giving me the message from our special friends that it was time to write the book I came here to write. You’re super special. Love you, Cosmos. I’d like to express my deep gratitude to Nancy Levin for challenging me to be a better writer. You are a remarkable author and teacher of writing. Your light shines so very brightly. Thank you, Bal Capote, for helping me grow in so many ways. You’re a true friend. I would like to thank my publisher, Balboa Press, for helping make my dream come true. Thank you for your expertise and assistance every step of the way. You’re amazing! To JHS, the other half of my soul, I thank you for the brutal honesty and life experiences that provided material for the book, hours of interesting conversation and, most of all, an opportunity for me to remember who I truly am. You are the love of all of my lifetimes.  Introduction What I Remembered One Christmas Eve, someone I had been dating for more than five years called, not to say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays,” but to tell me it was over. I was devastated. To say I never saw it coming wouldn’t be the truth. I did. But to say my mind ignored what my heart had known for some time would be. For most of my life, the end of a relationship felt like the end of my life. I depended on the love of another person to make me feel valuable and whole, because inside my head were these niggling thoughts that I wasn’t good enough—that I wasn’t lovable. This dependency made me blind to the truth about my relationships and my motivation for being in them. That blindness made me stay in relationships when I needed to leave them, often to my detriment. And that wasn’t the only detrimental effect my niggling thoughts were having on my life. Thinking I wasn’t good enough and not worthy of love held me back in my life in many ways. I often took things other people said personally and let their thoughts negatively affect me. There have been a lot of things I didn’t experience because my thoughts told me I wasn’t capable. My life was full of ups and downs, making me feel helpless and hopeless at times. But, all of that was about to change. During an afternoon of tears and despair over the breakup, I experienced something marvelous. Right in the middle of sobbing, sniffling, and feeling sorry for myself, I stopped crying. No whimpering, no deep breaths. Just silence. Then, I heard a voice within me say, “Wait a minute. This can’t be right—all this crying, misery, doom, and gloom. There has to be something else.” I noticed I was sitting upright now instead of slumped over the ottoman. My dogs were staring at me. The voice continued: “The truth is I am not special because someone else thinks I am—I am special all by myself. And I don’t need someone else to love me—I need to love myself.” Who was saying all of this? The voice wasn’t coming from my mind. These weren’t my thoughts. No. This voice was coming from a deeper, more authentic place. It was coming from my soul, my heart-center. I knew these words were the truth. I knew it with all my heart. My life has never been the same. Since that day, I have been on a quest to uncover the whole truth about who I really am. It’s not a quest I have orchestrated, though. It is a quest that has unfolded with divine guidance at the helm. I am a big part of that divine guidance. As more is revealed to me in ways I could have never imagined, through experiences I could have never devised in my mind, I can see what has happened to me that made me long for love and why I thought that love existed outside of me. I want to share this information with you. What’s in This Book? To communicate to you what I have experienced, I have arranged this book into three main parts—Mood, Food, and Gratitude. Each part has several essays that can be read as stand-alone articles or as part of the whole. Each essay builds on the next, as does each main part. Whatever method you choose to read the book is just the way you are meant to read it. In part I, Mood, I uncover the main motivators in life. The first essay sets up the system of contrasts that I use throughout the book to illustrate how each of these motivators shapes our life experiences. The disparities between what our thoughts tell us and what our hearts tell us will become clear and easy to recognize simply through contrast. Through the remaining essays in part I, you will see how contrast also assists us in breaking down the misperceptions and damaging thoughts we have been programmed to believe about ourselves and others. This ultimately leads us to remembering what is real versus what is unreal. Along the way, contrast is used to illuminate the origin of our thoughts, which will assist us in correcting our training, allowing us to take our lives and our power back from our thoughts—thoughts that have made us believe we are less than we are, that have made us feel like victims, and that have had adverse effects on our health. In part II, we move to Food—the food of life, which is everything that feeds our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls. Here we get a chance to see the building blocks of the universe, which are no different from our own building blocks. This is where we dip into the quantum realm of energy and the truth about how it looks, feels, and sounds to us. This perspective is important in understanding who we really are and why we feel sadness or joy, stress or peace, sick or healthy. We will answer the questions, “Why are we feeding ourselves chemicals and nutritionally deficient food? Why do we ignore what our bodies are telling us?” and “Why are we often disconnected from reality?” The energetic connection to our life experiences and the thoughts we have are keys to remembering our truths. With remembering comes understanding. With understanding comes healing. Healing leads us to part III—Gratitude. In this part, I remind you of the amazing gifts and super powers within you. I cannot teach you what you already know in your heart to be true. However, many of us are often so caught up in our thoughts that we have forgotten how cleansing it is to spend time with nature or how powerful a peaceful moment can be. Part III is motivated only by love and the high frequency aspects of love—kindness, compassion, and connection. There is so much assistance available to guide us back to our authentic truth that it can be found virtually everywhere. All we have to do is tune into it.