© 2018 2nd edition
extended reprint
Author: Rose K.
Cover design, illustration: Kurt Bachmann
Publisher: tredition GmbH, Hamburg
ISBN: 978-3-7439-9223-8 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-3-7439-9224-5 (eBook)
Translated from German into English:
Mincor translation company
http://mincor.net/portfolio/book-translation/
This work and all its parts are subject to copyright. Any exploitation without written permission from the author is not permitted. This applies in particular to electronic or other forms of duplication, translation, distribution and publication. Bibliographical information from the German National Library: The German National Library catalogues this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographical data can be accessed online via http://dnb.dnb.de
Life shows us the direction we must look in – what we see there, however, is up to us.
The developments around the world over the last hundred years are, in every respect, simply incredible. We have reached the pinnacle of our technologies; everything is now completely computerized. We communicate with one another on a global scale. The Earth has enough resources to provide for all of humankind’s needs. There is also so much money that if we were to divide it equally among every person on the planet, then each would receive ten million dollars. In spite of all this...
• Eight hundred million people suffer from malnutrition;
• Forty-three million are starving in wealthy Europe alone;
• Each day more than forty-three species become extinct because their habitats are destroyed by human activities;
• In the developing world, sixty-three percent of the people lack access to safe drinking water;
• A quarter of the world’s clean water has become unusable as a result of air pollution;
• Each day more than two hundred and eighty square miles of tropical rain forest are lost, which in turn completely alters the global climate;
• Every minute over seventy-eight barrels of oil are burned;
• Billions of dollars are dumped into warfare and weapons;
• Each day more than seventy square miles of fertile territory degrade into wasteland;
• Water is becoming the issue that will control our destiny;
• The year-round snow cover for artificial ski slopes requires more than one hundred thousand gallons of water per acre;
• In the United States, a crime is committed once every fifteen seconds;
• Millions of people live below the poverty line;
• Parents sell their own children;
• Gang rapes take place all over the world, often with lethal consequences for the victims;
• Infants and children are being sexually abused;
• Human organs have become a billion-dollar industry;
• Incapable of finding their way in our world, children and youths suffer from depression;
• Human trafficking takes place on a larger scale than in past centuries;
• Child labour has expanded on a scale not seen since the Dark Ages;
• Women are still being stoned to death or burned alive;
• Animals are being abused every day and subjected to gruesome killings;
• On factory farms, animals are kept under unspeakable conditions and are cruelly transported to slaughterhouses, where they are often still conscious as they are hacked to death for the meat industry;
• Many seas have been depleted of their wildlife;
• In the fur industry, animals are routinely skinned alive;
• The mineral treasures of Antarctica, like everywhere else on Earth, are being ruthlessly exploited;
• Terrorist attacks have become an everyday occurrence;
• In Thailand, shrimp fishermen are forced to live on boats for years like slaves and are thrown overboard if they become ill;
• Centuries of ancient cultures and traditions, so essential to our social order, are simply vanishing;
• Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, as well as mental illnesses, are spreading like wildfire;
• Burn-out, the manager’s disease, has reached elementary school;
• Some children never live past their first moments on Earth simply because they are girls;
• Sixty million people are currently displaced from their homes, fleeing from poverty, wars, repressive regimes, terrorist attacks ...
Today we live in an era of increasing crises, both global and individual, despite humankind’s supposed high degree of development, with no solution in sight.
In our world there should be no reason for a child to die of hunger or thirst, if we were to do things right. Any child who starves today does not simply die – he or she is murdered. Why does our abundance of food never make it to the people who need it the most? How can we continue to prosper from the land and the oceans without destroying them? Who will stand in the way of stock-market speculators turning food and water into gambling chips or instruments of power? Politics, economics and science must come together because by 2050 the world population will have reached ten billion. Since 2008, the human population is growing three times faster than our agricultural output. Could genetic modification be a plausible solution for this deadly gap? Will Africa be converted into a mega-plantation, ruled by new colonial powers? Will it be enough to take the resources we already have and divide them more fairly? Vast portions of the world’s harvest are wasted by corruption and mismanagement. Changing lifestyles in emerging countries like China are leading to a water shortage. The expansion of deserts around the world is now unstoppable. Even the rich and powerful USA is not immune to these problems.
Humankind, originally thought of as the protector of earthly creation, has now become this planet’s greatest threat. People poison their bodies with addictive substances and pollute their minds with images of crime, violence and death. The situation in the world today is nothing more than a reflection of the collective consciousness of every individual. We are overcome with thoughts in the form of experiences.
It’s no surprise that civilization is on the verge of collapse due to the convergence of climate, energy, refugee and wartime crises. What’s truly astonishing is that this is common knowledge to anyone who has been paying attention. Yet whoever wants to clean their house must first see that it needs cleaning.
When did this all begin... and how is it going to end?
The answer lies with every single individual. The destruction began when humans developed into eccentrics, after they had lost their centre, their inner core, for whatever they do to others or to their environment, they have long been doing to themselves.
Emotions like jealousy, hostility, antipathy, rejection, mistrust, vengefulness, anger, fear, hatred, frustration, placing blame with others, disgust, bitterness, rivalry and arrogance, are part of everyday life. The DISSATISFACTION is endless. Human weaknesses and negative characteristics are always rooted in fear. It is the phenomenal power of negative vibrations, which masses of people constantly send out, that seals us all off from the life force of well-being.
The root of all evil, which time and time again has managed to break through for hundreds of years, is the weak self-consciousness, the feelings of inferiority and insecurities of people. This all leads to negative emotions, delusions of grandeur, war and fighting, when our purpose is actually quite simple: “Love one another and multiply.” Experiencing and reciprocating true love, however, requires a lot of maturity and self-consciousness, for being loved gives strengths, but loving somebody is an act of bravery that takes courage.
Yes, “vitamin EL8” (eternal love), which guarantees strength and balance for a life of fulfilment, is sold out. Yet love is our destiny. We cannot find the meaning of life on our own.
For most people, there is nothing beyond physical reality. They live in a world of bodily pains and physical pleasures. Because they are fully absorbed by physical reality, they are raising a new generation of pure materialists, and the planet has become nothing more than a mirror to them.
How time flies. Two years have already passed since Lilian and her daughter Johanna, November 2010, took that night flight from Mumbai to Munich. The connecting flight to Washington was calm and very pleasant. High above the clouds, Lilian had thought to herself then about the ten very intense years behind her. She still remembered very clearly the countless dark paths her life had taken her down and how much she had learned, especially whenever she had lost her way. Nevertheless she found the light that always shone, even in the darkest alleys of life. Lilian didn’t always get what she wished for, but she always got what she needed, and she only possessed the things that she already felt. All of these things lie behind her: the powerlessness of being abandoned by her husband, the exhausting struggle against cancer, the helplessness of both her daughters’ psychological breakdowns and the financial and emotional despair of life in a foreign land.
Now she knows that we choose everything in life ourselves, with the intention of growing and that we always have the choice of how we experience things.
It’s November again – now 2012 and Lilian, a native of the Valais region of Switzerland, is once again living in her homeland. Ten month ago she had left Santa Fe, the city of Holy Faith in New Mexico, after a lady from New York had taken over the self-help shop on the plaza that Lilian had so lovingly created.
Johanna, her elder daughter, now twenty-nine years old, had overcome her short, but vehement, life crisis fantastically and was back on track. She had to reach her own borders in order to cross into new territory in her life. After a period of intensive self-discovery, she was able to re-define her self-confidence as well as her outlook on life.
Only through conscious perception is it possible to know your way, to recognize the crossings and see which direction to take so that you can head toward your goals in life.
Johanna, a trained nurse, is now the head of the post-anaesthesia care unit at a Medical Centre in Santa Fe, while also completing her Bachelor of Science degree in nursing. The young Swiss-American woman has also turned over a new leaf in her personal life.
At the weekly farmer’s market, she caught sight of a good-looking young man and, just for the fun of it, she whistled after him – a loud whistle, with two fingers in her mouth. Surprised, the man spun around and Johanna couldn't think of anything else to do but to tell him that she is the love of his life and he just doesn’t know it yet. The young man, who turns out to be a geologist living in nearby Tesuque, responded casually: “Ok, prove it.” Since then, the two have been inseparable. They love fishing and camping together, basically any activity involving the outdoors and they are very happy together.
Lilian’s younger daughter, Margrit, had also followed her dream. Since successfully completing her university degree, she is a passionate teacher in Long Beach, California. She lives with her girlfriend in a cozy apartment not far from the beach.
For Lilian, it was something of a surprise when her baby girl suddenly decided at age twenty-five that she preferred to be with women. This was new territory for Lilian, as she had never been close to any LGBT people before. Surprisingly, the fact that she was an open-minded, flexible and modern psychotherapist didn’t make the situation any easier for her.
Over a period of six months, Lilian worked hard to understand, accept and respect her daughter partner choice – in exact that order. Life is hard enough, Lilian told herself at the time, and moments like this show her that we don't have any choice over whom we fall in love with – we simply love, and this experience is now another part of Margrit’s journey through life.
Femininity brings an intuitive access to reality and, when a woman is unable to tap into this, she feels incomplete. As with any relationships between people, the law of attraction comes into play. Because like attracts like, we find someone who longs for the same things that we do. This person is like a mirror placed in front of us, enabling us to better recognize the things we have to work on. For no other person can give us something that we are unwilling to give ourselves. This shows how every- thing in life revolves around relationships. There is no other situation in the world in which we can experience so much of ourselves. That’s why many partners are bound to each other by their weaknesses, to help each other grow, because the goal is an independent relationship in which the partners are bound to each other by their strengths.
Like all of the valuable lessons that Lilian has learned in life, this insight too brought her a big step further along. Yet to understand people and their actions, you first have to understand and recognize yourself so you will not be hurt by the choices other people make for themselves or the actions they take.
“Love is the ability to give those important to us the freedom they need to be who they want to be, regardless of whether or not we can identify with it ourselves.”
George Bernard Shaw, 1928
Too often we don’t see how things really are but rather how we are. So, Lilian concentrates on her own behaviour, deeply aware of how an action from someone else causes a reaction in her. By becoming conscious of our reactions, we can overcome the tendency to criticize others, which is always received as judgmental and so ultimately causes divisions.
Lilian is so proud of her daughters. Just to know that they are happy brings her great comfort every day, despite the great distance between them, now that she is living in Switzerland again. At fifty, Lilian has had plenty of experience with the difficult task of “letting go.” By now it’s clear to her that this only works when the other person is really ready to be let go of. It’s only possible to let go of someone when they confirm to you that they are truthfully okay, that they are happy and capable of making it on their own. Manipulation often plays a big part in this, for parents and children, as well as between two partners.
Of course, for Lilian the distance between herself and the girls and her desire to be with them make things more difficult. No matter what, though, the experiences the three of them have been through together will always keep them very close. Lilian’s decision to leave America and to let the girls live their own lives was ultimately in everyone’s best interest, and she promised deeply to always be there for them when they needed her. Only now was Lilian able to recognize just how focused she had been on her girls all those years. They had become her sole purpose in life, though they were now in their late twenties. Now it was time to refill her empty vessel with new expectations from life, regardless of location and family. She must be true to her own personal needs, to the stage she has reached in life and her own ideals. She made up her mind about what she intended to do then came to a decision, with careful consideration, knowing that our decisions always shape our lives. We are the authors of our own stories.
Wow! This newfound freedom seemed both wonderful and frightening because it was still so unfamiliar. Somehow it’s always easier to do things for other people or for a certain purpose, and whenever we have “only” ourselves to please, there are many doubts; we simply aren’t raised to believe in how extraordinary we really are. We’d rather take cover behind our responsibilities and commitments. Everything would be so much easier if others could make us happy and give our lives meaning.
That’s usually how depression sets in. We are overcome with sadness because we can no longer motivate ourselves to determine our own existence or take responsibility for our own fulfilment in life. The soul begins to wilt above all when we spend years denying ourselves; for example, when we constantly sacrifice everything to help others, or when we work nonstop. We completely forget to ask ourselves: what’s right for me?
As an expert therapist, Lilian finds that the best cure for her patients is to get them to consciously enjoy things, starting with eight things a day, for twenty-one days in a row. Their morning shower, their coffee, the fresh air on the way to work or school, the first smile of the day, et cetera – by intensively enjoying things, we activate precisely those sensations that are needed to drive away melancholy and depression. Best of all, there are no side effects. Why twenty-one days? It has been neurologically proven that it takes exactly three weeks to recondition our brains, and that we can fundamentally change our state of mind in this short period of time. It’s not a matter of letting go of our beliefs, rather it is about simply questioning them, and then they let go of us.
Whenever someone spends these twenty-one days teaching themselves again how to enjoy things and really feel all the sensations that go along with enjoyment, afterward it is easy for them to find out for themselves: What do I want to enjoy in the first place? What’s it like when something feels good? Then they can decide what makes them happy and can start to re-shape their lives.
Happiness is understanding life’s complex laws, yet the greatest happiness is just being capable of being happy in the first place.
For years, Lilian has used this reconditioning technique, even on herself, above all; when she is working on developing her personality or when she wants to move beyond old patterns or renew her ways of thinking. She’s always aware that this little miracles can be obtained in just twenty-one days.
That cold and extremely windy January evening 2012, when Lilian landed in Zürich, she was nervous about what lay ahead for her. Already since late autumn she had been renting an apartment and an office space in a fantastic location, right in the centre of Rapperswil, The City of Roses.
This exclusive town on Zürich Lake has much to offer. In addition to its picturesque old city centre and medieval castle, each summer Rapperswil blossoms into a floral paradise. Over twenty thousand rose plants bloom in the four main rose gardens plus other public and private flowerbeds. The lakeside promenade and the old pedestrian bridge, which is around six hundred years old, leading to Hurden, bring a special atmosphere to the town. Yet it’s not just Rapperswil’s historical architecture but also its numerous festivals and cultural events that define the city for those who live there. The Christ-kindlimärt, a Christmas time fair, and the Seenachtsfest, a spectacular night-time festival on the lake, as well as the Blues ‘n’ Jazz Festival are just some of the city’s attractions. Families enjoy visiting Knie’s Kinderzoo, a zoo for children, and lovers of art and culture find numerous museums in town. With its diverse specialty shops and cafés, Rapperswil is also a beloved destination for shoppers.
Having spent the last fourteen years in the States, Lilian had no idea what to expect or how the Swiss people would react to her psycho-oncology and hypnotherapy practice.
Hypnotherapy, used to stimulate the subconscious toward problem-solving, has simply taken the States by storm with its success rates. Lilian devoted a long time to training for this profession, which can actually be considered a kind of calling. She completed a strict, four-year, clinically accredited course, including real-life internship experience. Today she knows that you never stop learning if you want to be a trustworthy and skilled therapist. It also takes deep empathy, absolute sincerity and great curiosity because every day you’re working with human emotions and all that people associate with those emotions. It’s about empathy – not pity, which doesn’t help anyone.
Hypnotherapy is a healing process. Using a special form of communication, the therapist helps the patient to enter varying degrees of trance state. This enables patients to experience themselves on a different level of consciousness: not rational and analytical, but sensual, visionary and intuitive.
Often we have reactions and experience stress- triggers that we can’t quite explain. That’s exactly what this therapy addresses. It helps the patient to find appropriate feelings that they may have ignored or failed to analyze in the past. The patient has buried his or her feelings alive, and hypnotherapy helps to uncover and restore those feelings, which are not dead. It is about tackling the root causes of suffering and not just treating the symptoms.
Troubling experiences must be processed so that mental health can be maintained. A healthy approach toward mental wellbeing protects one from illness. The human body is a single, unified system. The clinical process can also be used to eliminate causes of physical pain or illness and to examine their backgrounds in the patient’s life history.
As a medically certified psycho-oncologist, Lilian uses these methods with cancer patients. Psycho-oncology is the science of the psychosocial circumstances surrounding cancer, whether in preventive, acute or follow-up care. Living with cancer often has major impacts on the patient's entire life and the lives of family members, ranging from the physical to the psychological and the social. The somatic and psychosocial contexts are complex and highly variable. At times, life itself is called into question on an existential level. The disciplines of psycho-oncology deals with interrelationships among the illness, its emotional causes and its effects. It offers patients and their family’s goal- oriented support as they come to terms with the changes in their life situations.
Cancer is the cause of death for one in four people living today – and the numbers are rising! Researchers have estimated that one in three people worldwide will be faced at some point in their life with a diagnosis of cancer. In Switzerland alone, thirty-seven thousand people are diagnosed with cancer each year, and many of these patients have no other option but to submit themselves to the tortures of chemo and radiation therapy. These treatments result in a reduction in the quality of life, even as their effectiveness is often questionable.
How can it be, despite the billions in funding for research worldwide, that a truly successful cure for cancer has yet to be discovered – and that experts are still perplexed by the very nature of the disease itself? And what is the cause behind the constant and rapid increase in the cancer rate in Western, industrialized countries, while there are populations elsewhere in the world for whom cancer is unheard of, even today?
It’s certainly true that people are living longer lives now than ever before and that, for most people, sooner or later a tumor will appear. Yet the number of young people who suffer from this disease has also skyrocketed. Everyone is looking for a place to lay the blame, whether it’s the Western way of life, nutrition, chemicals, stress, anxiety, environmental pollution, or something else. Technically speaking, all of these things can lead to steady damage to our DNA. If this damage goes unnoticed and our repair system doesn’t kick in, or even if it’s weakened, the cell may make a drastic decision: it initiates a suicide mechanism known as apoptosis.
The next step is a trip to the doctor and, just like when you take your car in for service, you expect to be successfully repaired. The only thing we personally do to help ourselves, in most cases, is pay for standard health care through our health insurers.
At the beginning of the last century, cancer was the cause of death for only three percent of the population. Today the number is no less than twenty-four percent. What has changed? What have WE changed? Our biggest fear in the twenty-first century is that of poverty, and the biggest philosophical concern of our time is meaninglessness. These two emotions shape our lives today.
Without exception, we look to external factors to find an answer for our problems. Whatever happened to taking responsibility for ourselves? If we were more mindful in our lives, we would provide balanced nourishment for our bodies, get the right amount of sleep, plan to take regular breaks and concentrate on what is essential – we would feel and remain in touch with ourselves. “As within, so without” is the universal law. Mindfulness, then, is the only protection against diseases.
If a disease nevertheless does emerge, then the question arises as to its reason for coming. It always has the same motive: to disturb our inner alignment. As such, illness is like humankind’s wise friend carrying an important message. For many of us, crossing through illness on the path to healing leads to far-reaching changes. It causes us to start all over again. If only we could use our minds to find solutions, we wouldn’t have any problems. This illness cancer is an emotional illness, which means that, in addition to medical treatment, which is different for each individual, the disease must be dealt with on an emotional level. When we free ourselves of destructive habits, we’re already fifty-one percent of the way toward healing. After that, the body knows exactly which feeling it needs for the remaining forty-nine percent.