Excerpt: 'Quantum Wellness'

June 3, 2008 — -- New York Times best-selling author Kathy Freston has produced a popular series of guided meditation CDs on relationships, healing the body and prosperity. But in her new book, she hones in on the mind-body-spirit connection.

"Quantum Wellness: A Practical and Spiritual Guide to Health and Happiness" acts as an instructive book to teach readers how to reach their highest level of health and contentment through small but focused changes.

On "Good Morning America" today, she talked about five steps you can take to acheive happiness:

For the Body: 21-Day Cleanse Diet

For the Mind: Meditation

For the Spirit: Service to Others

For the Mind: Visualization

For the Mind and Spirit: Journaling

Read an excerpt of the book below.

CHAPTER ONE

What Is Quantum Wellness?

Making the Body-Mind-Spirit Connection

IF AN OLD FRIEND WERE TO GREET YOU ON THE STREET AND ASK,"How are you?" what would it take for you to answer honestly, "I'mvery well, thank you"?

Or is wellness something far greater, far more exhilarating andalive? With this book, I hope to convince you that wellness is a conditioninvolving every aspect of your being—body, mind, and spirit.That to be truly well means to be operating at full throttle no matteryour age or position in life; to be in a constant dance of pushing pastprevious limits and breaking new ground. You feel like you are inthe center of the vortex of life, filled with energy and a creative spark.You have a certain zip in your gait and a warm feeling of peace inyour heart, and it is as if there is some supercharged energy flowingthrough you. You feel brilliantly alive and connected to everythingthat is.

Is this too much to ask, especially given the state of the nation,the global community, the planet?

Absolutely not.

And it isn't all that hard to do.

As I will show you in this book, wellness begins with paying attentionto the little stuff, and then it swells in momentum until wefind ourselves on a whole new playing field. We start by taking a lookat our lives with honest eyes and then setting a few clear intentionsto change. We take a small step here, and another there, and beforewe know it, we are made new.

You see, wellness is not so much a goal as a process, a journey,a way of orienting yourself toward life. It's a feeling of total participationthat involves being in balance in the three key dimensions ofbody, mind, and spirit, and always looking at your actions and responsesto life as they affect these three dimensions and are affectedby them. It's about how you eat, how you listen to and take care ofyour body, how you process your feelings and connect to the largerworld.

Yes, it is possible to achieve this state of wellness. I have doneit, and I have helped or witnessed many other people doing it, too.In this book, we will start small but we will always be holistic inour approach. For example, when I talk about eating, I'm going to lookat food as a fuel that can support (or undermine) your body, your mind,and your spirit. I will also suggest a way of eating that does no harmto the rest of the planet. That may seem next to impossible. It's hardenough to get a healthy meal on the table without having to thinkabout the environmental impact of every single thing on your plate.And when you have no time to begin with, you sometimes want tothrow up your hands and grab a burger. But I will show you how possibleit really is. You'll take some comfortable, small steps, developa few new shopping and cooking habits—easy ones, delicious ones—and pretty soon you'll find yourself making healthier and healthierfood choices all the time, without much effort at all.

The same goes for making room for feeling your feelings or tendingto your spirit or your weight or your aches and pains. Smallsteps—simple changes to what you eat; a few new exercises; slightshifts in the way you perceive and resolve conflict, in the way youcommunicate; some gentle new practices to strengthen your spirituallife—followed by a few more small steps, and pretty soon you'lldiscover you've taken a quantum leap in how you feel and how youexperience life.

The term quantum brings to mind several meanings. Primarily, itrefers to very tiny particles and waves that are invisible to the nakedeye. It also brings to mind a sudden leap from one virtual state into anew manifest state, as if a particular result had been plucked out of asea of potentialities. And lastly, this leap, or spontaneous shift, is verymuch affected by the observer. So quantum wellness, to me, is aboutthe tiny little things that we invest our energy in every day and everymoment. These little investments of attention hold us in a steady andpredictable place. But when we make shifts—no matter how small andsubtle—we agitate the norm. And the more we turn our attention towellness—to eating consciously (both for ourselves and for its comprehensiveimpact; more on that later), to resolving our interpersonalconflicts, to reducing our footprint, just to name a few—the more westoke the fires of change. The momentum we generate through our actionsleads, eventually, to a tipping point, and then there is a breakthrough,a quantum leap. We get to breakthrough levels of wellnessby turning our attention to those things that add to the force field ofwellness.

Quantum wellness is not about imposing big changes but aboutleaning into wellness, comfortably, adding things here and there tothe thrust and taking baby steps toward the changes we want toachieve.

Think about it. This happens in life all the time. Maybe you aresomeone who used to be anxious all the time, relying on antianxietymedication to get through the day, and then one day realizedthat you hadn't taken your medication for a while and you were justfine. (By the way, I don't recommend going off any medication withoutthe help or advice of a health-care professional.) You aren'tsure if it was the exercise regimen that soothed your nerves or thenew friends you chose to be around or the fact that you gave updrinking caffeine. All you know is that you are not a wreck anymore.Or maybe you were like me and had acne for as long as youcould remember, but then woke up one morning with clear skin andnever had so much as another blemish. I'm not sure if I just grewthrough the hormonal period or if my skin looks better because Ichanged my diet and drink more water. In each of these examples,there were lots of little changes made, but something big and monumentalresulted.

These shifts reshape our lives. Of course, they don't come out ofnowhere: they're not magic. We have to do the footwork to make themhappen. But it's the small, incremental changes that vault us to a newexperience of ourselves. Remember that as you approach this work.So how do quantum leaps happen? And can we help them happen?Can we be more in control of them so that we can create transformationin our lives? Good questions.

The fact is, we don't really know the very specifics of how a quantumleap happens per se, and that tends to make us nervous. Eventhe greatest of quantum physicists doesn't really understand the exactmechanism. But the point is, they do happen. The implicationhere is that we too can affect the probability of something spectacularmaterializing by the energy we put into supporting the new.No, this doesn't mean we can hold in our mind a picture of a 24-inch waist and then suddenly shrink. That would be magical thinking. Quantum thinking isn't about kicking back and doing nothing,it's about understanding the incredible power of consciousness andchoice. And doing things with relative ease.

Don't worry. No one is suggesting that you relinquish your worldlylove of "stuff" or move to a mountaintop in order to be a more spiritualperson; you can be conscious while also enjoying the things thatmake you happy. Quantum wellness isn't about deprivation and it'snot about perfection. It is about pointing yourself in the direction ofgrowth, training yourself to get comfortable with your highest potential,and then taking small steps to support that shift. It's about showingup for yourself, day by day, and then one day finding that you'veundergone a transformation.

I have been at this self-improvement game for a long time andhave spent many (too many) years trying to follow guidelines andstick to rules put forth by various gurus. But I always ended up feelinglike a failure. When I ate too much sugar, I crucified myself,which of course made me eat even more. When I missed too manydays of exercise, I fell into slothful periods that sometimes lasted formonths. If I wasn't meditating regularly, I figured I was just not cutout for the spiritual life and gave up. By being so demanding of myself,I ended up getting nowhere; the do-or-die approach definitelydid not work with me.

And then I discovered that change and growth are part of our nature.We just have to point ourselves in the right direction and startmoving toward what it is we want to manifest. We have to acceptwhere we are and make peace with it, and we'll find the strength andthe will to change. I know that's how it worked for me.

When I made the decision to accept myself as I was, I began toeat better, exercise regularly, and do all the things I had alwayswanted to do. It wasn't that it just happened by itself, but it happenednaturally and without too much stress. And now, looking back, I cansee that I was taking four simple steps:

1. Listen and learn.

2. Set an intention.

3. Come up with a plan.

4. Make the move.

For example, I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. I triedso many times to quit: I drenched the pack with water so I couldn'tretrieve the cigarettes. I did acupuncture to foil the desire. I wore apatch. I underwent hypnosis. Nothing worked. So I just gave up andsaid, "Okay, this is where I am now." All the while I kept readingabout what nicotine does to the body and how smoking hurts yourlungs and immune system. Not to mention how it ages your skin.I just listened and learned. I didn't resist the information; I simplytook it in (while still smoking) and let it settle into my mind.Then I set my intention to be a nonsmoker. I didn't know how Iwould get there, because I had failed so many times, but I just putit out there to the world that I wanted to be a person who smelledgood and enjoyed downtime without jonesing for the next drag. Ididn't beat myself up every time I lit up, but I did think about theinformation I had downloaded. And I began to feel my energy movingin the direction of healing, just trusting that I would get there.After a few months of this, I came up with a plan to attend a smoking cessationworkshop, which I would follow with a week's vacationaway by myself. Once again I put it out into the ether that I was readyand willing to act when the time felt right.

This whole process—from gathering information to going awayon a solo vacation—probably lasted six months, but it stuck becauseI simply allowed myself to be where I was and to go at my own pace.Had I tried to do it all in one grandiose move, I probably would havefallen back into my old habit, but since I saw myself on a path, I feltcomfortable just nudging myself gradually in the right direction.We are all at various points along the continuum of wellness; wearrive at and handle different junctures according to our own personalcomfort levels. We may be ahead of the game in physical fitnesswhile lagging behind in spiritual awareness, or very emotionallyand psychologically astute but lazy in the way we eat. It's all okay.We just have to be willing to be honest with ourselves about wherewe are and then work to bring ourselves up to speed wherever growthis needed.

We can hasten our progress by taking an honest inventory and thenmapping out where we'd like to go. For me and my nicotine addiction,I knew there was a better way to live, and I wanted to move in the directionof being free of the habit. At the same time I very much wantedto keep doing what I was doing. I loved the social bonding with othersmokers; I loved the ritual of settling into the day with a smoke to getmy adrenaline flowing. But I also knew I couldn't advance in my life—physically or emotionally—without dealing with my attachment to abad dependency. I knew where I was on my continuum and decidedit was time to press onward.

After I quit, my life took a leap forward. I began to work with cancerpatients, teaching them guided meditation and breathing exercises,not as a direct result of quitting smoking, but more as part ofa "grand plan" for my life. I certainly couldn't have taken that directionhad I remained a smoker. No one wants to smell smoke ontheir counselor; and who would have believed I knew what I wastalking about if I couldn't even shed my own unhealthy habit? Thepoint is, once I followed through on my decision to change in onearea of my life, other areas also experienced a major shift. I wentfrom being a barely working model to being a writer and counselor.Quitting smoking had always seemed nearly impossible, but I accomplishedit by staying relaxed about it, taking very doablesteps, and allowing myself to be directed by an inner compass. Ishowed up as a willing participant in my own conscious evolution,let the momentum build, and the rest unfolded with and for me.Our development is an unfinished and ongoing story. That's what isso exciting; we are creating ourselves and our world as we go. Andevery little move we make, each decision and perception we land on,makes a difference in how things unfold.

To help you understand this critical point, we can look to an interestingdiscovery made in meteorology called the butterfly effect.In 1961, Edward Norton Lorenz entered a figure for wind velocityinto a computer in an attempt to predict weather conditions. Takinga shortcut, he entered .506 instead of .506127. What he found wasastounding: that tiny difference of .000127 radically altered the ensuing weather scenario. The concept Lorenz developed around hisfindings became known as the butterfly effect, because a wind velocitydifference of .000127 seems so totally insignificant—muchlike the difference in velocity that might be caused by the flappingwings of a butterfly. Lorenz concluded that the slightest and seeminglymost insignificant initial condition could drastically modify theweather going forward. That tiny variation could create such a differentpath or momentum, that it might in fact initiate a chain of meteorologicalevents that could change a sunny day into a tornado. Inchaos theory, this is known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions.A tiny shift matters that much. The message is obvious, andI find the metaphorical conclusion—that every action, no matter howsmall, can cause a huge reaction somewhere else or at some futuretime—to be profound (and true).

The more we adjust or shift—even in tiny ways—the more we canlook forward to sweeping changes showing up in our lives. We can cutone thing out of our diet, add a minute or two of meditation, or turnour attention just for a moment toward kindness, and before we knowit we are different people creating a different world. This far-reachingshift is dependent entirely on our willingness to consistently movealong the wellness continuum, in whatever incremental ways we can.In the atmosphere, as in life, every small factor is significant andinfluential. This is why setting your intention and living your life ina way that pulls you toward your ultimate empowerment—in everymoment—is so important. You can direct your experience of life insuch a fundamental way. Every conversation you have, every morselyou eat, every purchase you make, and on and on, factors in to whereyou will find yourself in a week, a year, or a decade.A friend of mine likes to remind me that even just wearing a buttonor putting a bumper sticker on your car can change the courseof history. That's not just hyperbole. Think about it. Say the buttonsparks a conversation in the checkout line in the supermarket. Theperson you chatted with then adopts the change you are promoting.You have just changed every remaining day of that person's life. Andif that person decides to make that advocacy issue his life's mission,well then, his excitement will generate yet more new waves in theworld (or pond!) and thus the dance of life takes a new twist! All fromsimply putting a bumper sticker on your car or wearing a button.Every little thing you do adds up and before you know it you'vecreated your life. And how you create your life ripples out and affectseveryone and everything that crosses your path, known or unknownto you.

Now imagine that you are in a rowboat, and everything you dois one push of the paddle. Is it a strong stroke, moving you forward?Or is it sideways or chaotic, leaving you vulnerable to the current?Think of this wellness journey as that rowboat. Once you get the hangof rowing with the current and not against it, in harmony with whoyou truly are at your highest potential, every move you make willmove you forward with greater efficiency. Just follow the rhythm ofthe current, add to it some of your own muscle, and you'll soon beamazed at how your momentum increases and you start meeting andsurpassing your goals.

As you awaken to this power to affect your life, pay close attentionto your feelings and observations. Ask yourself: Where am I nowand where do I want to be? Just be aware. The more you become awareof the effects of each choice you make, the more you will be able tochoose differently and better for yourself. As you live more creatively,you'll be amazed at how these small moments come together and informyour big breakthroughs.

Body, mind, and spirit all work together to create wellness, and we simplycannot experience the upsurge, the full thrust required for a quantum shift when any of these three areas goes unheeded. We can go tothe gym every day and eat the right foods, but if our souls are sick, wewon't be well. We can meditate till the cows come home and yet notfeel quite right in our bodies if we are still smoking or eating sugar orfeeling belittled at work. But don't worry: being imperfect is all partof the process. We don't have to be masterful. We need not get everythingjust right. We just need to push ourselves a little bit here andthere to get the momentum going, and from that, strength and confidencewill settle into the parts of us that lag behind. And then themagic happens: momentous changes occur seemingly on their own.Look at it this way: all the bits and pieces of our lives fit and flow togetherlike an ever-shifting matrix of influences. We are in constantformation, and there comes a moment—unchosen and unforeseeableby us—when everything just clicks, and a leap occurs.An organism or species evolves through multiple and simultaneouschanges. Our musculature—both intellectual and biological—must be worked on even as our spiritual sights are raised. Andeverything goes into the creative—or evolutionary—soup. We throwin a bit of this, stir in a bit of that—until we find we've created somethingnew for ourselves.

How to Use This Book

Whether you are feeling sluggish or disconnected or are copingwith a serious chronic illness, you will find a mix of practices andideas here, in the interplay of which you will experience your wellnessbreakthroughs. The tools are effective on their own, but two ormore used together will make the whole process more effective, morerapid, and more fun. Also, if you mix things up you won't get boredor overwhelmed.

You will also discover how each tool supports the other realms.The better you feel physically, for example, the more fun you willwant to have; having more fun, you will naturally be inclined to lookfor ways to share your joy. You will also experience a broader viewof yourself and the world around you.

I once heard Ken Wilber, the highly acclaimed transpersonalphilosopher, describe a study in which one group of people learnedto meditate under the tutelage of a monk. Their focus was singularand intense as the monk coached them and guided them to learn acertain method. The other group of meditation students, also overseenby the monk, simultaneously undertook a weight-lifting program.These students divided their time between learning toimprove both skills. Guess who progressed more in their meditationpractice? Not the students who stayed singularly focused; theylearned and progressed, but not nearly as much as the students whospread their energy between the two endeavors. Wilber explainsthat by engaging your multiple intelligences (whether musical,mathematical, intuitive, or as yet undefined) you light up differentareas of the brain, creating more space for a broader breakthrough.By approaching your wellness goals in a multipronged way, youwill become more proficient all around. Remember, we are made upof multiple moving parts; we vary in levels of spiritual aptitude aswell as emotional and intellectual astuteness. We also have physicalabilities that range from poor to excellent. Just observe where youthink you could improve, and choose the tool or practice that willhelp you get there.

I encourage you to read through each chapter and try a few ideasthat you think would make the most difference. Don't try tackling allof them at once; rather, gain some mastery of one or two until youfeel comfortable, and then add another into the mix. By building yourtoolbox slowly and organically, you construct a launch pad from uponwhich this whole cross-training approach can take wing.As you embark on a journey toward quantum wellness, you cancount on two things:

1. As you increase your knowledge of what it is to be well,everything that is "not well" will reveal itself. You will be morereadily able to identify that which needs your attention.

2. You will find within you the ability to bring light to allthose places that are wounded or unenlightened so that you canexperience magnificent multidimensional wellness.You see, the path of wellness is a path of transcendence. You willconstantly be brought to the walls that keep you stuck and you willbe challenged to overcome them. You will become more attuned toall the wonder and grace at work in the world today—the miraculouscures, the everyday heroes who have stepped out of their comfort zone and made a difference, the stories of human kindness that would meltany heart. As you undertake to become more and more well, you willfind yourself resonating more with that extraordinary energy. In fact,you will, through your own magnetic, amped-up vitality, draw to youevents, meetings, and circumstances that you might never haveimagined possible.

It is said that as you rise, the world rises to greet you. As youstrive toward greater levels of wellness, you will discover that youare not working alone or in a void; you are part of a larger whole thatis also leaning forward into life. You will intuit what is right whileat the same time being guided toward the next steps. You will be carriedalong even as you push yourself toward greater and greater levelsof happiness and health.

Each of us has a part in this process. We are all meant to becomefree, whole, and healed. A few steps along the wellness continuum andyou will no longer be at a loss for words when someone asks you, "Howare you today?"

Please join me as we explore the simple changes and small stepsthat will lead you to quantum wellness.