16‑ Living in Joy

Proverb

I have dedicated this chapter to joy, for it is a collection of especially lovely exercises and suggestions that can bring you into extremely pleasant states. I hope you have enjoyed the exercises in this book so far and have had some very personal “aha” experiences and wonderful moments. This chapter is a bonus and is meant to inspire you to play with what you have learned and to gather new experiences and resources.

In many exercises you give something to other people—in thought or in reality—such as love, reconciliation, gifts, wishes, etc. In the act of giving, however, we simultaneously receive something far more valuable for ourselves. Please do not understand this to mean that if you give someone a birthday present you will receive a much bigger one in return on your own birthday. That is not the point! The moment you happily give something to someone else—attention, feelings, wishes, love or something material—you participate in the flow of energy of the universe. You signal to your subconscious that there is more than enough of what you give away, and your subconscious will see to it that you live in even greater abundance and wealth. If you want to be loved, then you should love. If you want more recognition or attention, then grant recognition and attention to others. If you want more money, then give away a part of your money to others. You will see: everything you give away will return to you gilded.

Clearing Personal Relationships

Choose a pleasant place outdoors, go there in your mind and gather around you all the people who have been and are important in your life. One after another, shake each person’s hand and look him or her in the eyes. Thank each for playing that role in your life and tell the person what you liked and what you did not like. Wait for a reaction. Make a clean sweep with everyone in this way. Clarify your relationships. Then enter the future with these people and carry present events forward into that future.

What have you done so far to maintain a good relationship with these people?

What have you invested?

How often have you paid them compliments?

What can you do to improve your relationships with these people?

Self‑Forgiveness

After tidying up your personal relationships, you will now improve your relationship with yourself. Forgive yourself for every old mistake, sin, omission and embarrassment and dare a fresh start. Feelings of guilt and shame no longer belong in your life; they simply serve no purpose! At every moment you make the decision that seems to you the most suitable and best in the circumstances known to you at the time.

Why should you therefore have a bad conscience when you only did what seemed most sensible to you? Are you clairvoyant? Could you have known what consequences would actually occur? No, you could not! Therefore there is absolutely no reason to feel guilty. What matters is that you have learned something from the situation and do not repeat the mistake. Guilt and shame will only limit your access to good, resource‑rich states, and in those states your chances for optimal behaviour are best. Free yourself from guilt and shame.

Place of Healing

Find a symbol for an unpleasant experience or a bad feeling that represents the experience or feeling for you. Sit back and relax a little. Focus on an inner place—the place of healing. I do not know what your personal place of healing looks like or where it is located. It may exist in reality, or it may exist only in your imagination. My place of healing is on a high mountain plateau, with steep cliffs all around. The sky is blue and there are trees nearby. From this summit you can see very far in every direction. As if by a miracle there is a spring up here; water flows from a rock into a small round pool—the water of healing.

Whenever I have an experience with which I want to make peace, I turn it into a symbol, wrap it in brown paper and take it to this place. There I hold it under the water and ask for the positive intentions of this experience. For that I then receive a new symbol as a precious gift. At this place you can transform any kind of symbol, bring quarrelling parts back together or make peace with your fellow humans, partners or colleagues. Design the surroundings so that, when you imagine this place, you automatically enter a mood in which such reconciliations become possible. Using this technique, banish anger, conflict, guilt and hatred from your life bit by bit.

He who is angry often burns in one day the wood he has gathered in many years.

(From China)

Farewell to Negative Feelings

Return once more to your personal place of healing. Separate yourself there from your negative feelings and thoughts. Celebrate this farewell, for it is an important step in your life. Honour them and thank them for the role they have played. If that is difficult, carry out reframing if necessary.

Take fear, worries, anger, rage, hatred, envy and guilt and grant them freedom. Let them go. Banish these feelings from your life.

Let your subconscious give you a symbol for these feelings and thoughts and then place these symbols in a small rocket. One last farewell—then the rocket lifts off. Feel how it and the feelings and thoughts it contains move ever farther away from you—farther and farther—until they melt in the light of the sun and transform into love.

“Whenever something disappears from your life, it is only a sign that something better is on its way.”

Arthur Lassen

Parts Party

In the chapter on reframing you may already have made the acquaintance of some of your parts. Why not invite all your parts to a little party? There you can talk a bit about your goals and intentions and tell who they are, where they come from and how they would like to be treated. If you feel like it, let the parts do a little flirting with one another.

“Love is the only thing that grows when we squander it.”

Ricarda Huch

Love Letters to Yourself

Why not write a love letter to yourself? Write down what you have done well, what you like about yourself, and do it in well‑formed sentences. In writing you are describing your subconscious.

»Dear …,

yesterday you once again gave me a truly wonderful day. You worked fantastically, with concentration and consistency, right up to the evening. Then you went dancing and showed just how much power is in you. You were tremendously brave when you were the first to step onto the dance floor and dance alone. I admire that about you. When you decide to enjoy yourself, nothing and no one can spoil the evening. You even dared to speak to that interesting person—something you didn’t dare three weeks ago. You didn’t manage to start a long conversation, but at least you made her / him smile with your cheeky opening line. I think it’s great that you took the first step and didn’t feel rejected when she / he wasn’t very talkative. In those moments I’m proud of you! I also like that lately you have done so much for your health. You’ve changed your diet and you’re exercising again. It’s nice to see that you’re doing something for yourself and not just rushing from one appointment to the next. You already look much stronger and healthier, and your charming smile shines even more. The confidence and elegance of your movements radiate outward and earn you respect from others. I look forward to meeting you again. Have a wonderful day. I love you just the way you are.«

Incidentally, writing letters is an excellent strategy for falling in love with another person. While writing you create a very focused image of the other person in your mind’s eye and engage very intensely with his or her virtues. In doing so these positive qualities burn themselves irresistibly into your brain. Believe me, this technique is extremely effective if you take time and effort when writing.

“If one could only love enough, one would be the most powerful person in the world.”

Emmet Fox

The Great Timeline

Put on some pleasant music and brace yourself! Have someone read the text aloud to you or read it through calmly, grasp the essential ideas, and then run through the process in your own way.

Step onto your timeline and go far back into the past. Look back at your first working years. Experience your training period, then your school time and your childhood. Grow ever younger until you experience your birth. Go even further back to the seventh month of pregnancy—get ever smaller, see the embryo, further back and finally to the day of your conception. Feel how the egg cell and sperm cell separate again and each remains with one parent. Experience your parents on a wonderful day, the first days of their relationship, the anticipation of their first date. Go further back in the life of your father or mother and witness, from your perspective, the first meeting with the partner. Further back into your parent’s childhood. See their parents and continue along the timeline of your grandparents. Experience times you did not know before. Follow the line of your ancestors through all ages. Travel through ancient castles and kingdoms, through the dawn of the modern age into the Middle Ages, through the Stone Age and ever further back. Follow the human timeline to the emergence of Neanderthals, then further back to our ancestors and to the origin of life itself. Continue and observe how the Earth forms … A whirling nebula dissolves ever faster, disappearing into the expanses of a universe that shrinks ever more rapidly—until suddenly you plunge into black nothingness.

Prepare now for a new world to be born. Slowly the gases form a cloud that spins and gradually shapes into a planet. Seas and land arise. Plants and animals appear. Watch human evolution as people become ever more intelligent. Wander through past times right into the present day. Experience shining and happy moments of humanity. See your grandparents on the day of their first encounter, then the birth and childhood of your parents. Give them all the resources they need to lead a happy life. Let them grow older until the day they meet for the first time. They get to know each other and their hearts ignite. Experience a day full of tenderness and an absolute top mood. Perhaps on this day your father says, “Sweetheart, look how the sun is laughing—today is a day for conceiving a hero.” On this day your parents are full of love for each other. Experience then how some little sperm cells set off, wanting to be the first to fertilise the egg. Feel how the egg hops for joy: “Here he comes—my chosen one!” Experience how the sperm cell realises it is chosen and how that awareness gives it the strength to be faster than all the others and win this race despite an unfavourable starting position. You have succeeded, mastered the first challenge of your life and thus earned the right to live and to be happy. You have become part of the miracle of life. Experience your parents’ excitement and joy on this day and during the next months. Then you come into the world—as the crown of a long evolution. Love surrounds you. Everyone wants to hold the little child in their arms. You grow older, live a wonderful childhood and an exciting youth—bathe these times in the same love that has accompanied you from birth. Leave those times behind, shape them to your liking. It was a beautiful time, and the future will be even more beautiful. Slowly return to the point in your life from which you started. Remain there a moment and bathe all your thoughts in love. Then move forward into a radiant future, create your vision anew. See yourself at the fulfilment of all your wishes. Enjoy it and then return to the here and now.

Couple Timeline

If you currently have a steady partner whom you love very much, then take him or her with you onto the timeline. Walk together into your future. Share your experiences and feelings there. Tell each other what role the partner plays there, what you experience together and what your visions of the future look like.

Morning Programme

How well do you manage each morning to tune in to the day ahead? Don’t you sometimes focus so much on the tasks waiting for you that you adopt a narrowed perspective and forget your great dreams and life principles? A computer boots up at every start, loading all the drivers and checking whether the system is properly connected. If an error occurs it must first be corrected. Have you ever considered booting up the far more complicated computer on your shoulders each morning? Of course there are countless drivers. But can it hurt to activate the most important drivers every morning? To feed your computer each morning with love, joy and positive thoughts? Do not allow the first information that reaches you in the morning of a new day to be news you cannot control, such as the night’s accident statistics from the radio, or the grumpy colleague next door greeting you with the suggestion, “You don’t look well this morning—did something happen?” Decide for yourself what you want to think about first thing in the morning. Write down these thoughts and hang them over the bed so that every morning your first glance falls on them. If you have the know‑how, let your computer in this multimedia age wake you and play you a recording of these words, plus pictures that instantly show you what is worth living for today. That would be a tailor‑made assignment! To inspire you a little I will print an excerpt from my own morning appeal here.

»Good morning, little prince!

A new, unique day in your life has begun. Enjoy it! This is YOUR life. Only YOU decide what you will make of it. Waiting is also a decision! Take a deep breath and then go into this day with POWER and ENTHUSIASM. Breathe it, live it—CELEBRATE it until you collapse into bed exhausted. Smile—because laughter changes the world—it is your very special weapon. Rejoice in life, in your overflowing PASSION, your tireless STRENGTH, your strong SELF‑CONFIDENCE and your unshakable FAITH! With these qualities you will bring your wildest dreams to life!!! Act and you will succeed! Try everything. Turn yourself into an ant and observe this world from every perspective. Open your eyes, ears, nose and feel the wind on your face. See, hear, smell, feel this world, feel the life in you. There is but one goal—to live according to your own ideas. That is worth fighting for, with the highest stake—your life. Remember your highest goal! Listen to your vision. Do you hear how it cries out for fulfilment? Nothing can hurt you—unless you let it. Nothing can make you sad—unless you want it. No one can influence your feelings—unless you allow it! You must do nothing—except die. You are as free as a bird in the sky. But you CAN do everything. You can make anything of your life. It is your gift, your chance, your CHALLENGE. Go your way without regret for the past—it is brilliant; without worry for the future—it will be even more brilliant. Look forward to today and believe in your SUCCESS. In your heart there is so much COURAGE, POWER and IMAGINATION that you could ignite the whole world with your fire. Let the fire inside guide you, send out your imagination, seize fate boldly by the horns and force it to its knees—YOU WILL SUCCEED!!!«

Another possible text might be:

»Today is the first day of the rest of my life. From now on I will be the captain of my ship, for from today I control my thoughts. I decide whether I consider something unpleasant or interesting, whether I want to be annoyed with others or not, whether I want to rejoice in life, my inexhaustible strength, my adventurous imagination and my rock‑solid optimism, or whether I want to be bored to death. I decide whether I want to learn something new, tackle new tasks or change my living conditions. I alone decide. I will never again hold others responsible for my fate, because I know it is I myself who creates my feelings—the good as well as the bad. I set my own limits. I can make it, I want to make it, I will make it! There will also be times when I am pushed to the limit of my capabilities, times when I perceive life as unfair, cruel and unjust, times when everything within me—my faith, my values, my patience, my trust, my resilience—is stretched to the extreme. I know that some people let themselves be destroyed by such times, but I will seize these opportunities to emerge a stronger person. In such situations I will discover powers within me of which I never even knew. I already look forward to these discoveries. Even if I feel I have been treated badly, there are always people who have endured far worse. Yes, I will use these opportunities to learn about life from life itself. I welcome these challenges, will face them and grow from them. Every day I will do a little more than everyone else. When my daily work is done I will stay a little longer. That is my investment in the future. I will not do it for pay but for the pride and satisfaction in the doing itself. From now on I will give my best every day and in every task. Today I will rediscover a force I believed lost since childhood—the power of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm works wonders; it tears down walls and obstacles to rush toward victory with unbridled force. When I reclaim it, my life will become a triumphant march. I want enthusiasm not only today but also tomorrow and every day of my life—unlimited, genuine and sincere—so that my love, my joy and my success do not fade in a brief blaze, but have the power to ignite all the people of this Earth with my fire.«

Your texts need not be as long as in these two examples. You have learned so many suggestions in this book that it will not be difficult to choose the ones that suit you.

Silent Wishes

Stroll through the pedestrian zone of the nearest large city, nod friendly to every person you meet and silently wish them something you believe that person could use. Be honest and sincere. Wish the people happiness, love, hope, energy, courage or whatever you think appropriate. Experience how strongly these wishes influence your own mood.

Mirror Image

Before leaving the house, take a look in the mirror and smile at yourself. Step into the world with a smile.

The world is only a mirror of ourselves—beam at the world and it beams back!

Assume social responsibility in an area of your choice. Dedicate yourself to disabled children, elderly or sick people; provide development aid in poor countries. Help the homeless and victims of natural disasters. Work for the preservation of our environment. There are countless possibilities. Do your part—together we are strong! Do everything in your power to give all people a better life. Transfer the methods and techniques you have learned for yourself on a small scale to the larger one—to the whole world. In reframing you brought your internal conflicting parts to an agreement by asking for the higher intention of a part and especially honouring it. Imagine for a moment that the parts are not parts of a single personality but individual people—parts of a greater universe. What is common? What is the higher positive intention? With this model one could work for world peace. How did you feel when you sensed that you had brought your conflicting parts to the table? Did you not develop such a good feeling that you believed one could also bring people together with the principle of this technique? Stand up for a better world!

“If every person on Earth made just one other person happy, there would be no wars, no famines, no distress.”

Jürgen Höller