Have you been feeling like life has become less reliable and stable? Are you looking for more hope, health and calm in your life? You’re not alone. There are external factors causing these feelings. You will be completely unable to remain the same as this book weaves you through the world as we have known it, into a world where anything is possible! No stone is left unturned through this thoroughly researched exploration of mostly unexamined factors inherent to Western society that set us up to feel more uncomfortable at this time in the West, particularly in the U.S., as we undergo a macroshift globally.
Written at the tail end of her ten years living and working in Asia to understand why it seems now that we’re less equipped to create vibrantly healthy, happy lives in the West, Alison J. Kay, Phd, documents an eye-opening, sometimes humorous, sometimes raw contrast of modern, globalized, Western culture with Asian. Feel the freedom as she gently guides you to more ease!
What if There's Nothing Wrong?
By Alison J. KayBalboa Press
Copyright © 2012 Alison J. Kay, PhD
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4525-6146-2Chapter One
Dear Reader
Hi there. This book is a transmission to you, energetically encoded and written in a style to give you an experience, rather than a mind-to-mind, cognitive engagement of the mechanics of thinking, concluding, judging, categorizing and labeling as you go through the book. In fact, it's been written to help take you out of your mind. Your current mind, that is, and helps you step into something bigger within yourself so we can also step into something bigger as a society, collectively.
The reading of this book is a direct experience of what the ideas are suggesting.
This book is meant to connect to and ask questions of the higher part of you, beyond your everyday cognitive, "ego-mind." This discovery process has to happen experientially. Therefore, you have to go through it; it can't be delivered in quick bullet points. Otherwise, it becomes what it is intending to help dissipate.
The first pages of the first chapter will most likely not feel "right" to your mind. The wording will feel strange. Some of my preliminary readers who experienced this said they caught the rhythm around page forty. The ideas won't be directly delivered, but circular, almost in the obscure way a Master addresses her disciple, but always eventually delivering the teaching. Like a Chinese Chi Gong Master or a Zen Master with his koans. Frustrating at first. And this will cause reactions, judgment and conclusions as the mind acts in its predictable ways, wanting the meat to chew on-the conclusion. It will also possibly react to certain sections with impatience and frustration as your mind resists the information and the energy behind the ideas because it is in fact challenging this very part of your mind by working around it.
This is key to understand. Cultivate mental agility and flexibility; challenge that conformity to the mind's rigid demands for sound bites and quick delivery of tidbits of information. Get out of formulaic reading and thinking. Awaken even more, beyond your everyday thoughts and mind. Experience this book as if it is a workshop or retreat-or gym-in how to work with your mind. Indeed, that is exactly what this is.
As I tell my yoga and meditation students, and my clients who come to me for individualized meditation programs, you're meeting with resistance because you're just starting.
In meditation when we first sit down to observe our mind, it does not really react well at all. In fact, it tends to rebel. We notice more restlessness, more "monkey-mind" bounding from tree limb to tree limb, or thought-to-thought. Or conclusions about how there's no clear goal, or how we can't do this, or how we can't be this way, and off we go following the mind, quitting before anything in us beyond the mind has had time to be engaged.
There is a reason why you picked this book up. Trust that.
The more steadfastness you exert, the more you can stay right with what's being said in the line you're reading right at that moment. So you'll be more in present moment, where energy expands and presence occurs, making less room for the cognitive mind. There will then be less clinging to the mind's judgments. Following your thoughts and going off on one of your mind's habitual trains of thought will happen less this way, too. This is one of the intended outcomes of taking in this book. I have written this as a meditator of twenty one years, and a meditation and yoga teacher of fourteen years. You will feel this, eventually, under the words, if you don't right away. It will be re-working your cognitive mind's natural tendencies to be jumpy, easily distracted and busy with its concluding, labeling and judging, as if you were in fact meditating.
However, this is not a self-help book. Rather, it is a commentary on the state of our country, and the West in general, due to the obesity we have allowed the mind to become. However, in order to deliver this message, key aspects to how the mind became this way, and then other ways of being in our human minds with a lot more comfort, are presented.
So, the first part of the book is a clearing process. After a few years into my teaching career, I realized that I did this with my students during the first month of school-when I taught at the high school level. This was apparently not needed at the middle school level. The first part of the book, as you readjust, will most likely challenge your mind's demands to hurry up. Another key suggestion is that you engage the Observer in you. We each have this ability in us whether we're meditators or not. The Observer is on top of a boulder raised high above the little personality, "ego-mind" version of ourselves, looking down and simply observing itself make choices as it goes through life. Observe your impatience with wanting the point to be delivered immediately. Observe your desire for conclusions to be made so you can feel more comfortable being in the known rather than the question. Observe your mind's demand for a clear understanding right from the start. Practice the art of allowing. Allow the points being made to develop and unfold.
This is a transmission that is meant to be experienced. Reading this book will take you through a process of de-conditioning your mind from its feeling of being in control. The writing will softly, gradually, but very clearly put your mind in the back seat, while something Higher in your consciousness gradually begins to step forward and receive this book's content.
This book activates other parts of your human system, your intuitive inner knowing. This happens even though it goes in through your mind. The questions asked of you are connecting to something beyond the every day mind, asking this part of you to step more forward and interact with the ideas. It does not present issues or problems for the mind to chew on. It instead presents the way it has been in order to understand why it's the way it is now and gently asks you to consider seeing yourself, our society and our role on the planet in a different way now, here, in 2012 and beyond.
This different way is not from the mind. So, this book is not speaking to your mind. It's going at your heart, your wisdom and your Higher Self. The writing style is therefore not quick, sharp, demanding nor direct, as the mind is. It is instead, the same energy as where these ideas are meant to go to inside of you. And where it's meant to take each of you, and all of us. The hope here is to give you access to another energy, another way of being, another way of existing on this planet different than it has been.
So, that means a different way to deliver this message. I am loaning you a set of eyes from someone—me! —who was removed from our country two months prior to 9/11 and returning two years into Obama's administration. This country has changed. The content of the typical concerns, and the level of fear the average citizen seems to display, has changed. I can feel it so much so that within the first month back here I visualized an astronaut's helmet around my head. I did not want to absorb the general climate of thought as it has become here in the United States. It has apparently been a decade moving full throttle into fear. This has pulled at my heart, so much so that the labor behind this book increased in order to get this message out to more people. My workshops have increased and changed in their original intent and thus content, upon learning more and more what the everyday person here is worrying about.
Nevertheless, how about turning this inside out? Because that's what this book is going to do. I was turned upside down, and inside and out living in Asia for the past decade and have a mental flexibility and agility to my mind that my twenty years of meditation practice alone would not have given me. This removal of mine from our country appears to have been divinely timed. You can read my bio at HYPERLINK "http://www. healing-balance.com" www.healing-balance.com to understand that more. The consciousness behind my eyes-me!-has been a political consultant, has a masters in Public Administration focusing on Public Policy, has been a writer and teacher of English Literature and Administrator, a Yoga and Meditation Teacher, an Energy Healer and a daughter of a mom who needed my energy healing when diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor.
One more thing-this book is written from a deep belief in our ability to change in positive ways in America. I have been involved in nothing but helping people awaken and grow since my first profession as a political consultant. During that work, I used some of the most fundamental democratic practices of grassroots organizing to successfully get the candidates whose campaign I was working on elected. I watched at precincts as votes came in, and watched as my candidates pulled forward in the number of votes, to victory. I enlisted people to go out, volunteering their time, to register voters. I could go on; I won't.
I taught American Literature in my second career, finding myself teaching. the Declaration of Independence, the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine,BenjaminFranklin's-oneofourcountry'sfirstmillionaires-essayon moral perfection, Emerson, Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the Beatniks and on up through to Post-Modern Literature. I read and reread year after year the founding principles of this country. I traced our development of a national character alongside the industrial revolution, some of it with the critiques of the Transcendentalists as industrialization kicked into full gear in the late 1800's.
I believe in our country's ideals. The American ingenuity, idealism, passion and belief in something better being possible is what our country is founded on. So are my business, my book, my radio show (HYPERLINK "http://www.voiceamerica.com" www.voiceamerica.com), and my belief that something far greater than what we're currently allowing ourselves to be is possible. Maybe part of my Bostonian upbringing has something to do with this. Therefore, it is with this spirit that I have painstakingly labored at times over the communication of these ideas in this book because it feels somewhat like my contribution to my fellow Americans. Please remember that as you read what are critiques, not criticisms, of our country.
I invite you to get out of your own way even more, allowing yourself to be even bigger than you currently are. Living in a more alive way, living in a more authentic way that you are on fire about, having more vitality, passion and enthusiasm for yourself growing into being more than you ever thought possible. That is my hope for each of us. More health, more wealth (if that's what you desire, especially if you were tripped up into the mentality that there isn't enough to go around) and more joy. If we each were to live at this level-with an aware, alive joy-then could you even begin to imagine what it would be like to be in community? And what this would do for the collective good of us in America? And in the West? And on our little planet? Now is the time! And a part of you already knows this; otherwise, you never would have picked up this book. Trust that part of you. And me. Namaste.
Welcome
You've made a major decision just by picking up this book. I say the same thing to my clients. It appears, after doing energy healing and being in the holistic health and natural healing field for 20 years, that I seem to attract people who are ready for something much greater than where they're currently operating. In fact, I have been nicknamed a "lightning bolt" due to the way my work quickly pierces to the very core of what my clients are truly needing. You can view video testimonials saying as much at HYPERLINK "http://www.healing-balance.com" www.healing-balance. com. I don't mess around. One client puts it, "What I like about you Alison is that this is not a romance, it's not a dance. You, like an arrow, get straight to where it is that I was blocked and we went right at releasing it."
So I congratulate you on being attracted to what is in this book. It says something about you! It will no doubt challenge you in ways that you've most likely not been before, challenging your most deeply held, cherished beliefs -many of which you are unconscious of even holding. Many of these same beliefs are at the core of how our society has functioned for the past 300 years or so, and thus what your mind has taken in as "the way things are."
What you will get from this book are many things.
1. This book is about power. Power for individuals; societal and universal power. You will be able to see how you can have more ease and vitality. You'll be guided how to restore or increase the "magic" in your life. You'll be shown how to directly access this power source for yourself, flushing your life with this power in a very practical way. This book also delivers very clear instruction on how to work with our thoughts to move beyond the mind in order to access this power. Where this power resides according to the wisdom from ancient cultures and the new cutting edge sciences, a.k.a. "The New Sciences" will also be presented. Much of this is from the author's own experience from living and working in Asia for a decade while researching ancient practices for vitality, longevity and power, working as a successful energy healer, yoga teacher, meditation teacher, chi gong teacher, vegetarian personal trainer and body builder for the past 20 years.
2. You will gain a crystal clear picture of why life in the United States in particular feels so unstable, comparatively; say to about ten years ago. This is beyond the commonly blamed sources. American society in particular, but Western society in general, has been and continues to be vulnerable to losing its power right now. You'll be given a window to see how our society has been trained to turn away from the power in subtle energy and consciousness while also be given quite a solid understanding about how subtle energy and consciousness is seen as THE source of power in the East. This comparison will help you appreciate just how much we leave out in our society's views on life, and what we're missing out on.
3. You'll then gain a clear view of how Western culture is in the midst of a mostly unspoken shift that is changing the way we "do life." This is a massive shift, or "macroshift" from a society structured by Newtonian Physics, based on denser energy and a more physical understanding of our world. The times we're heading into are more of Quantum Physics, based on a lighter, more fluid, quicker, more random energy. You'll learn how Newtonian Physics deals with the physical, while Quantum Physics deals with consciousness. The understanding that old structures society-wide are crumbling because they are based on doing things in this old way, and this is no longer possible will calm you. Hence, they're crumbling. This is not bad. This is change. In addition, it's where we are. Anything too dense is being forced to change. This appears to us as breaking down, or crumbling. It is at both the individual and societal level this density is being broken down. You'll also have a sense of how this all coincides with the nature of the years immediately preceding and following 2012, a time predicted to be The Great Awakening for humanity.
4. You'll see how this translates in a very real way to how we in the West, particularly America, are being commanded to adopt a new fundamental way of doing things. The discussion will show you how at the start of modernization and industrialization Western science had its focus more towards the physical, in reaction to the main sentiments of their times. You'll gradually have the picture painted for you of how this old model, or metaparadigm, is no longer relevant to our times now. So you'll then understand a great part of why it feels so unstable today in the USA and the West overall. We are at a turning point; there is a global macro-shift underway. These changes are causing us to feel unstable, individually and collectively, throughout the top organizations and sectors of our society. Therefore, we can regain our vitality, strength and edge.
5. Very clearly, you will be shown that in order for us to remain competitive and viable as individuals and as a leading nation on this planet we must deal with the most basic aspect of being human ,our minds. You'll see how this connects to consciousness, the period we're entering into. This means dealing with our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, behaviors and choices, rather than focusing mostly on the physical. Globalization has given us a new world. Equally, the very nature of 2012 is as a turning point.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What if There's Nothing Wrong?by Alison J. Kay Copyright © 2012 by Alison J. Kay, PhD. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
