Mental and Emotional Release

Foreword “Who am I meant to be? Will I ever find the person that I’m meant to be with? How can I truly be happy? What is my true purpose in life?” These are pretty big questions, and they’re questions that have plagued me since I was a small child. After sneaking into my parents’ bedroom at the age of five and seeing my father meditating, I decided that was something I wanted to do. My mom taught me how to meditate, gave me a mantra, and sent me on my merry way. Meditation really helped me rein in my consciousness and my energy. It helped me to relax my young mind and find a calm state. I was still very young when I heard a swami from India talk about consciousness. Though I was barely in grammar school at the time, I remember him saying that our entire reality is in our mind. Really? That didn’t seem possible. How can everything that I experience be right here in my head? Furthermore, if that’s true, it means I have control over my happiness. It means I have the ability to make my life the way that I want it. It means that I’m responsible for my experiences. That was a lot of heavy-duty thinking for an eight-year-old to process. A life-changing moment came for me at the age of twelve when I got to do a fire walk with Anthony Robbins. I’d heard others say things like, “Everything is in your mind,” and “You have the ability to become empowered as an individual if you can change your mind,” long before I heard Tony say it. In fact, from the time that I was a little kid, I’d heard a bunch of different people say, “If you’re free of your fear, if you’re free from your negative emotions, if you’re free to control your mind, you can begin creating a world anyway you want.” But the difference that day was that we went outside and walked on twelve feet of burning hot coals to prove it. I didn’t have to be a genius to know that fire burns. Yet after walking across those red hot coals, my feet seemed pretty okay. Needless to say, as a twelve-year-old, that experience shook my world up a bit. Suddenly I had evidence, proof, an undeniable experience that my thoughts could affect my outcomes. Whoa … I attended a few more fire walks before I went on to take a practitioner training in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) at the age of thirteen. This training was another defining moment in my life, for it taught me the power of language and deepened my understanding of the mind-body connection. I became a Master Practitioner of NLP before I entered high school. In the NLP Master Practitioner training, I witnessed individuals release phobias and other deep-seated negative patterns, serious patterns and issues that most professionals claimed could not be released that easily. But they were. After high school, I began to work for my father’s company, and I began to teach this “self-empowerment” stuff. I decided I wanted to look at human empowerment from a more academic perspective as well, so I went back to school and became a Doctor of Integrative Health Psychology. (That’s a fancy way of saying I studied the mind-body-energy connection.) This path brought me to where I am today. It’s helped me to understand not just a mind-body connection, but the inherent potential for empowerment each of us has inside. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was able to work with Dr. Bruce Lipton, who wrote The Biology of Belief. When his book came out in 2005, it was a defining moment for me as a teacher. His book starts off by saying that any scientist reading the book will basically say, “Yeah, we already know this stuff.” He goes on to say something that I’d would like to echo: What we’ve been taught through the media, through Hollywood, through common cultural philosophy is that we are at the whim of certain elements and unable to change them. But as scientists will affirm, that’s simply not true. Over the past few decades, I’ve taught dozens of groups and thousands of students every year. These days, I start off by saying this is my favorite time to teach. Not only is there scientific evidence of the mind-body connection, it’s been around for three decades at least. Not only is there evidence of the existence of energy but scientific researchers have validated that energy affects our cells—and our reality, first and foremost. Not only is there evidence that you can have freedom from your fear, but those symptoms, diseases, and issues the media claims you have no control over? We now have evidence that you do have control. You can release seemingly immovable, impenetrable issues and be free of them forever. This book is focused on the technique I teach called Mental and Emotional Release (MER) therapy. I get to spend my life teaching people that the baggage they have been told is real is no more real than that bad dream you had a few nights ago. Imagine for a moment if you could be free from your baggage, free from your limitations, and free from the pain. How different would your life be? What we all want is happiness. But you can’t be happy when you’re filled with anger, sadness, fear, hurt, or guilt. You can’t find those amazing connections if you have limiting beliefs about yourself. And you can’t find your purpose, that person you’re meant to be in this life, those things you’re meant to do, and those things that you’re meant to have unless you clear out the garbage that’s blocking you. In fact, with that garbage still in the way, you won’t even be able to see possibilities for yourself, much less live them.