www.masteryoflife.com
www.relationshipseminars.net
www.billferguson.com
Return to the Heart
P.O. Box 541813
Houston, Texas 77254
U.S.A.
(713) 520-5370
www.masteryoflife.com
www.relationshipseminars.net
www.billferguson.com
Copyright © 2006 by Bill Ferguson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of an audio recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use without the written permission of the publisher.
Book design: www.MarkGelotte.com
Library of Congress
Control Number: 2005910555
Second Edition
ISBN 1-878410-38-5
ISBN: 9781878410474
Made in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to Sue: my wife, my partner, and my best friend.
CONTENTS
1. Create The Experience Of Love
2. Heal The Hurt
3. Find Your Core Issues
4. Make Peace With The Dragon
5. Let Go
6. Open Your Heart
7. Watch How You Speak
8. Live At Cause
9. Clean Up Your Life
10. Be Free Of Guilt And Resentment
11. Heal Your Relationships
12. Be Prosperous
13. Go For Your Dreams
14. Find Your Life Purpose; Serve
15. Experience Your Spirituality
16. The Choice Is Yours
CHAPTER 1
CREATE THE EXPERIENCE OF LOVE
You can create a life of miracles. This may seem impossible but it’s not. This is actually the natural state. You lived this way when you were a young child, but lost it in the process of growing up. Now you can get it back.
You can set yourself free inside and have your life be the exciting adventure it once was. You do this by creating something called the experience of love.
When the experience of love is present, life is a joy. You are happy and alive. You have inner freedom and peace. You feel good about yourself, your life, and everyone around you. You are confident, creative, and very effective.
You can flow with whatever happens. You see life clearly and know what needs to be done. You radiate a very positive energy, life works wonderfully, and great things happen.
This is the experience of love. This is also where miracles take place.
The presence or absence of this state may seem to be a function of what happens around you, but it’s not. It’s a function of how you relate to what happens. In other words, it’s a function of you.
You create or destroy the experience of love by how you relate to the world around you. A good way to see this is to look at relationships.
How do you feel when someone genuinely accepts and appreciates you? Doesn’t this feel great? Of course it does. You feel better about yourself and better about life. You also feel better about the person who accepts and appreciates you.
The same thing happens when you accept and appreciate someone else. That person automatically feels better about life and better about you.
By giving acceptance and appreciation, you create the experience of love.
Now look at the opposite. How do you feel when someone is non-accepting, critical, or controlling towards you?
Instantly, the experience of love disappears. You get hurt and upset. You put up your walls of protection and automatically resist the person who treats you this way.
The same thing happens when you are non-accepting, critical or controlling toward someone else. That person gets upset, puts up his or her walls of protection, and becomes critical and resentful toward you.
Every time you interact with another person, or with life itself, you either create love or destroy love – and whatever you give comes right back.
When you give acceptance and appreciation, you create the experience of love and great things happen around you. When you give non-acceptance, you destroy love and negative things happen around you.
Literally, you determine what happens around you by how you relate to life. If you want your life to be full of miracles, put your focus on creating the experience of love. You do this by giving the gift of acceptance and appreciation.
Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done. Some people and certain areas of life are very difficult to accept.
Fortunately, non-acceptance is an illusion. Have you ever tried to change someone? Have you ever been successful? Not likely.
How many times have you tried to change someone and the person got worse? This is much more likely. Just look at how you feel when someone tries to change you. How do you feel about changing? Not very interested, are you?
Find someone in your life that you can’t accept. Notice that this person has a particular view of life and a particular way of behaving. Notice that this person is exactly the way he or she is without any regard for how you feel about it.
What we fight is the truth. At any moment, the people in your life are the way they are, your circumstances are the way they are, and you are the way you are.
Everything may change tomorrow, but at this moment, your life and the people in it are exactly the way they are.
When you fight the truth of the way someone is, you destroy the experience of love. You get upset and close down. All you can do is fight, resist, hang on, and withdraw.
The other person then gets upset and becomes non-accepting and critical toward you. Then you get more upset and more critical toward the other person. Then the other person becomes more critical toward you.
Without knowing, you create a cycle of conflict: a cycle of resisting, attacking, and withdrawing from each other. This cycle goes on and on without either person ever noticing his or her role in the conflict.
This cycle of conflict is present in any relationship that isn’t working. It’s also present in any area of your life that isn’t working. There is something that you are resisting. This area of life then resists you in return.
By resisting, you create opposition and resistance against yourself. It’s like a law of physics. The very act of resisting magnifies and gives power to whatever you resist.
Imagine four yellow balloons on the ceiling above you. Now, whatever you do, don’t think about them. You just thought about them. Don’t do that. Stop.
Notice what happens when you resist the yellow balloons. You keep thinking about them. In fact, you can hardly think about any thing else. Resisting the thought of yellow balloons gives the thought power and keeps it alive.
The same thing happens with anything you resist. By your resisting, you create more of the very circumstances that you are attempting to avoid.
Look at the areas of your life that work effortlessly. These are areas where you can flow. There is no resistance. You see life clearly and are very effective.
Now look at the areas of life where you suffer. These are areas where you can’t flow. By resisting, you keep these areas of life from working. If you could let go of the resisting, these areas would clear up.
Difficult situations need action, not resisting. When you resist, you create a state of fear, upset, and tunnel vision that destroys your ability to see what needs to be done.
So why do we resist? We resist so we don’t have to feel all the suppressed hurt from the past that is being reactivated by our circumstances.
In an automatic, subconscious avoidance of this hurt, we fight, resist, hang on, and withdraw. This in turn destroys love and sabotages our lives.
Until you heal this suppressed hurt from the past, you will continue to resist. Your life will be full of struggle and the happiness that you seek will elude you forever.
Fortunately, it’s possible to heal this hurt. You can have the experience of love in every relationship and in every aspect of your life. This book will show you how.
First, you will learn how to heal your hurt and flow with life. Then you will learn how to create an environment where miracles are guaranteed.
ACTION TO TAKE
CHAPTER 2
HEAL THE HURT
The moment you get upset, the experience of love disappears. You close down inside. You get tunnel vision and lose your ability to see clearly. All you can do is fight, resist, hang on, and withdraw. This in turn makes your situation worse.
We think that upsets are caused by what happens, but they are not. Upsets are caused by fighting and resisting what happens.
Find a time in your life when you were upset. Now notice what would happen to the upset if you were totally at peace with what happened. There would be no upset.
If someone spills a glass of water on you, you are going to be wet, and how you feel about it is totally irrelevant. You are still wet. If you are at peace with being wet, you will have peace of mind. You will see your situation clearly and can see what needs to be done. You will be very effective.
If you fight being wet, you are going to be upset, and the more you fight being wet, the more upset you are going to be. But the upset is not the result of being wet, the upset is the result of fighting and resisting being wet.
The moment you take away the fighting and resisting, the upset disappears, and your effectiveness returns.
Notice that different people get upset at different things. If upsets were truly caused by what happened, then each person would react in exactly the same way. Obviously, this doesn’t happen.
In one of our workshops we do an exercise that demonstrates this. We tell everyone to close their eyes and relax. Then we have them notice whatever emotions they experience when we say certain words. We say words like “You’re fired,” “I love you,” “You can’t do anything right,” and “I don’t love you anymore.”
Each person has a totally different reaction to whatever words we say. When we say “you’re fired,” one person may feel relieved while another feels devastated. When we tell them “I love you,” one person may feel warm and happy while another feels sad or afraid.
Each person reacts in a different way because each person has a different set of suppressed emotions that get triggered. The more powerful these emotions, the more they run our lives.
The most destructive emotions come from our childhood. These emotions are the childhood hurt of feeling worthless, not good enough, not worth loving, a failure or some other form of feeling not okay.
It’s not the truth that we are this way. It’s just a suppressed childhood hurt, but it’s a hurt that totally runs our lives. As we run from this hurt, we destroy the experience of love. We sabotage our relationships, our careers, and our dreams.
To see some of the suppressed emotions in your life, notice what happens the moment you get upset. Instead of looking at your circumstances, look at what happens inside of you. Notice the immediate and powerful surge of emotions that come forth when you get upset.
When we get upset, we think we are avoiding certain circumstances but we’re not. We are avoiding the powerful emotions that these circumstances reactivate.
As we run from these feelings, we create havoc in our lives.
Any circumstance that triggers this hurt is considered a threat. In an automatic, subconscious attempt to avoid this threat, we fight, resist, hang on, and withdraw. This in turn destroys the experience of love and makes our lives more difficult.
If you could separate your circumstances from your feelings and allow yourself to feel this hurt from your past, the feelings would lose power and go away.
A good way to see this is to look at how little children handle hurt. When a young child gets hurt, the child cries. Then, when the crying is over, the hurt is all gone.
Children are masters at healing hurt because they do something we don’t notice. Instead of fighting their hurt, they feel it willingly. This allows the hurt to run its course. It comes and then it goes.
This is the natural process for healing hurt. When you allow yourself to feel your hurt willingly like a child, it loses power and goes away.