CHAPTER 1
You Are a Divine Being Temporarily Living in a Human Body
"The human body is the best picture of the human soul."
– LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
When I was a teenager, I read every book I could find on Edgar Cayce. Cayce, who we would now call a medical intuitive, was known as the Sleeping Prophet because he’d go into a hypnotic trance and then, knowing only a person’s name and address, diagnose their medical condition and suggest the right treatment—and this was almost always after everything else had failed. Born on a farm in Kentucky in 1877, Cayce had no knowledge of medicine or anatomy, making him an unlikely candidate for providing medical advice. He had only a grammar-school education, had read only the Bible, and worked as a photographer. But when he was 24 years old, he lost his voice. He tried everything to recover, and as a last resort he turned to hypnosis, which was becoming popular at the time. While he was under, Cayce successfully described the condition of his own vocal cords and what to do about his problem, and when he awoke, his speaking voice had been restored. Both Cayce and his family were astounded. Word spread, and soon he was using his diagnostic and curative powers to help thousands of people recover their health.
In 1923 Cayce moved from simply giving medical advice to answering much bigger questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” “What is the true nature of humans?” and “Why are we here?” The answers that came forth were based on several thousand “life readings”—information on people’s past lives. When asked more about where he was getting his information, he gave two sources. One was the unconscious or subconscious mind of whomever he was reading at the time. The other was what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious, or the Akashic Records. Cayce’s ponderings on life and health led him to a powerful conclusion about physical health:
The Spirit is Life
The Mind is the Builder
The Physical is the Result
This quote struck a deep chord of truth within me, and that truth has guided me for my entire life—all through medical school, residency, my years of medical practice, and beyond. I entered medical school knowing that illnesses don’t just jump out of the closet and land on us. There are much bigger forces at work. Divine forces. Knowing this has made all the difference in how I have treated people who have come to me with health concerns and how I live my own life. Without acknowledging these bigger forces—forces that our intellects can’t wrap themselves around—life on planet Earth can easily turn into a miserable hell of constant worry about our health. Not to mention a constant battle to get our bodies to “behave.” A hell in which we’re led to believe that we can’t trust our bodies, that we are universally vulnerable to everything that is “going around,” and that our bodies require constant monitoring—and prescription drugs—in order to stay healthy.
Catching disease early, or getting a vaccine, is our only chance. And death is always a failure.
This fear-based mind-set can also lead to great doubt and frustration in other parts of our lives. Not acknowledging the power of the Divine can keep us stranded in painful situations that go against everything we believe in. We can get stuck in jobs we hate. With relationships that detract from our lives rather than add to them. With a simple feeling of being lost, uncertain of what decisions to make.
But there’s another way. A much better way. When we acknowledge the Divine part of ourselves—God coming through us as us—the whole ball game changes. Life just works. If we align and co-create with the Divine—our Souls and our Spirits—life becomes a grand and exciting adventure of consciously bringing Spirit into matter and reveling in our physical bodies while knowing that we aren’t our bodies. We are no longer ignorant victims of our circumstances. We are powerful players in the game of life! We can create lives that are full, and happy, and healthy, and joyous, and radiant. We can be fully human and embodied while also knowing in our bone marrow that we are immortal, unlimited beings.
So what does this look like in our lives? What do I mean by “life just works”? Well, it means that we live robustly in all aspects of life—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
On a physical and emotional level, when we live from this perspective, we know that painful physical symptoms and emotions are signals from our Souls. They are trying to get our attention, asking us to turn inward and see what’s really happening. These are the keys to living fuller, more meaningful lives—not “punishment” for not doing something right in the past!
On the spiritual plane, when life just works, you make decisions that are good for you both mentally and physically. You are tapped into your true essence, which allows you to follow your passions and spread love and light to every person and circumstance you encounter. Your work, your friendships, your activities—everything works to bring you up to a higher level so you can lead an extraordinary life.
When life just works, you live longer. Your body and mind work better. You experience health and happiness. You are able to see what’s truly important so you can live in a way that creates no regrets.
Fear to Faith: The Key to Making Life Easy
The unity of body, mind, and Spirit has long been ignored in our quest for a good life. When searching for physical health, we turn to Western medicine, which operates from a reductionistic and obsolete model that treats symptoms as inconvenient things to be managed by masking them with drugs or sometimes surgery. You can see this in the frightening statistics about prescription drug use in the United States. Mayo Clinic researchers have found that 70 percent of all Americans are on at least one prescription drug—and many are on more than one. The most commonly prescribed are antibiotics, opioid painkillers, and antidepressants. The belief system of “better living through chemistry” runs so deep that when people like my mother, age 90, or my doctor friend Gladys, age 95, go to a doctor, the staff can’t believe they’re prescription free! They are certain there must be a mistake. When the majority of the population is medicated, it’s clear that something is dreadfully wrong. Medicating symptoms on an ongoing basis is a lot like putting duct tape over the indicator lights on the dashboard of your car—instead of looking under the hood to see what your engine is telling you it requires.
When we can acknowledge that our thoughts, beliefs, and circumstances and the agenda of our Souls all affect our physical and mental health dramatically, we start to see the power of each of the pieces of the puzzle described by Edgar Cayce: Spirit, mind, and body. If we align with the immense power of the Divine we, quite literally, have the keys to our own kingdom.
To fully understand the relationship between body, mind, and Spirit is to see that there is actually no separation between these parts. They all influence one another, and to focus on improving one brings better health and well-being to the others. We cannot simply look at physical health. Or mental health. Or spiritual health. We must look at them all together. We must bring each of these up to its highest state in order to live a full, healthy, happy life.
The Spirit Is LifeLet’s begin by looking at the first piece of Cayce’s philosophy: The Spirit is Life. To me, this refers to both the Soul and the Spirit. While these two terms are often used interchangeably, they are actually very different aspects of the Divine; however, they are both part of the Divine that makes up who you are. Your physical body is just a small part of the vastness of who you really are—like a drop of water in the ocean. Our bodies contain our Souls, which are connected to our Spirits. Our Spirits—or what some call our inner beings or higher selves—live outside of this material realm. Tapping into the Divine is tapping into the highest part of ourselves. We are all part of God.
And you get to call the Divine anything you want: your Higher Power, Buddha, God, Jesus, Allah, the Goddess, Great Spirit—you name it. It’s all your choice. There is no one “right” answer here. But no matter what you call it, to access the Divine part of yourself, you have to raise your vibration and begin the process of remembering this and communicating directly. Don’t make this too complicated. Just know that you are part of God.
I think of the Spirit as the enlightened “always in the light” part of us—the nonphysical part of ourselves that is not actually in our bodies but instead vibrating at a higher rate. The Spirit part of us is all-knowing and all-seeing. It is crucial that we know this part of ourselves. Our Spirits look on and remain above the fray—offering insights along the way, but not participating in the pain and suffering that are so often part of being in a body.
Soul, on the other hand, is embodied. It is down and in. The Soul brings us into our bodies, and our bodies are where the Soul work gets done. The Soul speaks to us through our bodies. And its lessons come through our bodies in many ways, including pain and illness. These experiences are not punishment for being bad. They are Soul-making opportunities. Soul is the intermediary between Spirit and ego.
The ego is responsible for our personal will—the part of us that must be developed enough to get up every morning and go to school and do homework or get up off the chair and exercise. Without personal will, absolutely nothing of value ever gets accomplished. And while there is no doubt that our personal will must be developed, we must be careful in how we do this. The development of individual will is often a big part of why we took birth in the first place. However, our personal will must be aligned with Divine will—the agenda our Souls picked before birth.
To align the Spirit, Soul, and ego is one key to creating a life that works. If you know how to properly work with your Soul and your Spirit on the earthly plane, you will be able to control the thoughts and emotions that can put you in either your own personal heaven or your own personal hell.
The Mind Is the Builder
“All impulses of thought have a tendency to clothe themselves in their physical equivalent.” This quote comes from Napoleon Hill, who wrote the classic book Think and Grow Rich, which was published back in 1937. And it explains exactly what Cayce was talking about when he said, “The mind is the builder”: Thoughts held over time greatly affect all areas of our lives. The quality of the thoughts we think creates the quality of the lives we live.
Everyone understands that thoughts and emotions can put us in a miserable mental state, but we have learned that they also affect the health of the body. Every thought we think is accompanied by an emotion—each of which has a distinct biochemistry associated with it. Thoughts of empowerment, love, and support feel good and result in an increase in immunity and a decrease in stress hormones that create wear and tear on the physical body. Thoughts of revenge, sadness, or anger feel bad. And held over time, they are associated with chemicals in the body that cause cellular inflammation—the root cause of most degenerative disease. Pretty simple, right?
But it goes even deeper than simply the hormonal influence on our current physical body. A thought that is repeated over and over again becomes a belief. And beliefs held over time actually become our biology. Our beliefs have the power to affect our genetic expression. Biological and neurochemical changes in our bodies associated with these beliefs determine which genes get expressed and which remain dormant. Hence we have more control over our biology than we’ve been led to believe.
The connection between our thoughts, our emotions, our beliefs, and our biology has now been thoroughly documented by many, including Dr. Bruce Lipton in his book The Biology of Belief and Dr. Mario Martinez in his book The MindBody Code—a book in which he also describes the devastating biologic effects of shame, abandonment, and betrayal.
The bottom line is this: When it comes to thoughts, we always have the choice to choose the thought that feels better. This becomes much easier when we’re aligned with our Spirits and our Souls. When you choose thoughts that are aligned with your true nature instead of based in fear, you are always going with the most empowering option. And given the connection between our thoughts, emotions, and biology, developing this skill is crucial.
The Physical Is the Result
The body is created by our beliefs and thoughts—whether they are aligned with Spirit or not. But concentrating on your thoughts is not nearly enough to create a physical body that makes life easy. It’s not enough to have a spiritual practice or even know about your Soul and your Spirit. To truly flourish, you have to pay attention to your body, taking care of it and meeting its needs. No matter how much you pray or meditate, you still need to eat. And to create the best body to make life easy, you need to know how to move, rest, and hydrate. Simple practices of movement and eating the right foods help preserve the quality of your tissues and your brain.
Just like each of the other aspects of making life easy, the body is intimately connected to the vitality of more than just itself. It is quite literally connected to and fueled by the same source that created the universe.
Working with Body, Mind, and Spirit
For years I have been fascinated by near-death experiences and the reports about heaven that come from these. I’ve also been astounded by miraculous physical recoveries that have followed near-death experiences and illnesses that should have been fatal. These recoveries come from connecting with the Divine and accessing the information required to bring life and health back. But it’s completely unnecessary to nearly die in order to realize the truth about our Souls and our connection to the Divine. We have the power to work with this while we’re still here.
That’s my goal in this book. I’m going to teach you how to work with all of you—body, Soul, mind, and Spirit—in a way that helps you create your own personal heaven on earth so that you can truly enjoy your life and live it to the fullest. In short, I’m going to help you make your life easy—on all levels. Starting now.
Copyright © 2018 by Christiane Northrup, M.D.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
