Step Three:
Get clear.
Spot was a stray dog I claimed as my own when I was in college. But he used to run off and tear up the neighbor’s gardens, run across the street and make drivers slam on their brakes, and just make a nuisance of himself. So I put him on a small leash. But I felt guilt for keeping this wonderful friend on a three foot leash. I bought a longer leash, six feet of freedom, and put it on Spot. I then walked six feet away and called Spot to me. He ran---three feet. He wouldn’t go an inch beyond the length of the old leash. I had to walk over to Spot, put my arm around him, and walk him out the full six feet of new leash. From then on, he used all of that leash.
I think each of us has a limit we’ve placed on our freedom. We need a “miracles coach” to help us see that in reality we have no limits. Jonathan does that with his clients. But he does it in a way that may seem pretty strange to you. Hang on to your seat and let me see if I can explain it to you...
The first time I had a session with Jonathan I didn’t know what to expect. I thought the man was a little strange because he couldn’t articulate what he did. But I’ve been a curious journalist for many years, so I jumped in and did a session with him.
“What’s your intention for this session?” Jonathan asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You can have anything you want. What do you want to focus on?”
I thought it over for a moment and then spoke.
“I want clarity on the book I am writing about Bruce
Barton.”
“What kind of clarity?”
“I want to know what I’m supposed to do next,” I said.
“Okay. Let’s go upstairs.”
Jonathan had me lie down on his massage table. He gently guided me to breathe in different colors.
“Breathe the color red through the top of your head and imagine it going through your body and out of your feet.”
We went through numerous colors.
“What other color do you need to breathe in?” he asked.
I said gray. He then asked me to breathe in that color. After several minutes of breathing deeply and relaxing on his massage table, Jonathan put his hand over my heart and said, “Open this up.”
While I didn’t consciously do anything, I felt a rush of electricity and energy shoot through me, almost blinding me. There was a strong white light surging through my body, blasting into my head, somehow illuminating the inside of my skull.
Suddenly I felt in the presence of angels, spirits, guides. I don’t know how to explain it. But it was real. I felt it. I sensed it. I knew they were there. And these beings somehow worked on me, altering my beliefs, helping me realize I had more “leash” than I thought.
I’m not sure how long I was in that altered state. Twenty minutes? An hour? I don’t know. When I finally sat up on the table, I noticed that Jonathan had a tear rolling down his cheek. When the energy started to blast through me, he moved aside to let it do its work. But the beauty and miracle of what he was seeing touched him. He was crying.
As my head cleared and I got my bearings, I realized I knew the next step for my book project. I was to go to Wisconsin and continue my research by looking at the private papers of Bruce Barton at the historical museum. I had gotten my intention.
And that’s not all.
Shortly after that first session with Jonathan I began to notice other changes in my outer life. The book I had been working on began to take direction. I found a publisher for it. I found the money to complete my research. I bought a new car. I bought a new house. My income soared.
How? Why?
I had invited the other side to help me, and it did.
As I write these words, I’m very aware that you may think I’ve lost my mind. After all, here I am, an adult, an author, a fairly well known speaker and marketing specialist who advises business executives about their work, talking about “spirits.”
But I also know that you know what I mean. Even the most atheistic among us has been touched by the miraculous, the uncanny, or the unexplainable. While no one knows what awaits on the other side of this life, we all tend to believe something intelligent is there.
Maybe it’s worth mentioning that the book that helped me the most here was What Can A Man Believe? by Bruce Barton. In it he explained that there was little proof for heaven after earth, but that it was far wiser to believe than not believe.
In other words, while I can’t prove that angels and guides are standing ready to help you, isn’t it a much more delicious and comforting and magical thought to believe in them then to not believe in them? There’s no concrete evidence to support them or deny them. But when you can use the belief in them to create miracles, wouldn’t you be wise to do so?
Yesterday a friend of mine called and said she wanted to believe in guides and angels and teachers from the spiritual side of life, but a part of her doubted they existed.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I have my doubts, as well."
"You do?”
“Sure,” I said. “If I had to go into a court of law and prove I had spirit guides, they would laugh me out of the courthouse. There’s no proof for them, but also there’s no proof against them.”
And then I remembered something I had read in a recent issue of Reader’s Digest, where Larry Dossey talked about prayer. He said praying helped people recover from illness. In many cases they recovered from what Doctors had said were “incurable” illnesses. What these successful patients did was pray. Even the patients admitted they didn’t know if the prayers were answered, but it was the belief in the praying and the act of praying that helped them anyway. Again, as Barton pointed out, it is wiser to believe than not to believe. Believing helps create miracles.
Barton wrote this passage in 1927, in his book What Can A Man Believe? I’ve always loved it as it seems to stir the very something he talks about within me. See what it does for you:
“In every human being, whether emperor or cowboy, prince or pauper, philosopher or slave, there is a mysterious something which he neither understands nor controls. It may lie dormant for so long as to be almost forgotten; it may be so repressed that the man supposes it is dead. But one night he is alone in the desert under the starry sky; one day he stands with bowed head and damp eyes beside an open grave; or there comes an hour when he clings with desperate instinct to the wet rail of a storm-tossed boat, and suddenly out of the forgotten depths of his being this mysterious something leaps forth. It over-reaches habit; it pushes aside reason, and with a voice that will not be denied it cries out its questionings and its prayer.”
So let’s assume you don’t have access to Jonathan (though you can reach me, and other healers and mentors by emailing the people in the back of this book). What can you do?
Easy. Focus on what you want, and make one of your intentions finding someone to help you clear yourself of old beliefs so you can create the life you want. Help exists. State your intention to the world and allow it to come to you.
I feel it’s important to have support from a mentor. It’s too easy to fall back into the old way of thinking, to feel sorry for ourselves and play the role of victim. The vast majority of your current friends probably won’t support your desire to create miracles. When I first started seeing Jonathan, I would visit him once a month. He and I quickly saw that we needed to stay in touch at least once a week. Me and Jonathan made a pact that said, “Whenever I’m not clear, I am to call him.” Then, whenever I let something in life throw me for a tailspin, I would call him.
Another woman recently asked me what it meant to “get clear” with my beliefs. I thought about it for a while before I could answer. The image that came to me was of a football team. If one of those players is hurting, upset, feeling neglected, angry because the coach overlooked him earlier or his girlfriend dumped him, that one player can jeopardize or sabotage the entire team’s success.
You are like the whole football team. If all parts of you, all of the beliefs inside of you, are in alignment, no problem. You’ll achieve your desires. But if any part of you, any belief in you, doesn’t support your intention, it will jeopardize or sabotage you. That’s why you may have had lousy luck at love, romance, money or health. Some part of you doesn’t want it. We need to heal that part. When you do, you are clear.
How do you know if you are clear right now?
Think of something that you want to have, do, or be.
Why don’t you have it yet?
If your answer is something negative, you aren’t clear. If you say anything except an honest “I know it’s on the way to me,” you probably aren’t clear inside with what you want.
Another question to ask yourself is, “What does it mean that you don’t yet have what you want?”
Your answer to that question will reveal your beliefs. For example, if you say, “I have to do such and such first,” then you have a belief that you have to do something before you can have what you want.
If you say, “My soul doesn’t want me to have this,” then you are stating your own beliefs about what you think your soul wants for you.
If you say, “I don’t know how to get what I want,” then you are revealing a belief that says you have to know how to get what you want before you can have it.
Your beliefs aren’t that hard to find.
Self-help author Mandy Evans says certain beliefs can lead to a very bad day. Beliefs cause stress, not your business or life situations.
“There’s what happened to you in your life and then there’s what you decided it meant,” says Evans, author of Travelling Free: How to Recover from the Past by Changing Your Beliefs.
“Change your conclusions, or your beliefs about the events in your past,” explains Evans, “and you can change the way you live your life today. Certain beliefs can really trip us up.”
Beliefs shape the way we feel, think and act, says Evans, an expert in personal belief systems. But you can’t change them until you know what they are. Evans offers a list of “The Top 20 Self-Defeating Beliefs” in Travelling Free, her second book, as a way to begin exploring them.
“As you look at each belief, ask yourself if you believe it,” suggests Evans. “If you do, then ask yourself why you believe it. Gently explore your own reasons for buying into any self-limiting belief.”
Here are ten of her Top 20 limiting beliefs.
1. I’m not good enough to be loved.
2. No matter what I do, I should be doing something else.
3. If it hasn’t happened yet, it never will.
4. If you know what I’m really like, you wouldn’t want me.
5. I don’t know what I want.
6. I upset people.
7. Sex is dirty and nasty; save it for the one you love.
8. Better stop wanting; if you get your hopes up, you’ll get hurt.
9. If I fail, I should feel bad for a long time and be really scared to try again.
10. I should have worked this out by now.
Those are all beliefs. Sometimes you need another person to point out your beliefs. When my friend Linda and I had breakfast one day, and I hired her to help me with some promotion, she said, “I’m afraid some of my friends will be jealous of me.”
“That’s a belief,” I said.
Linda’s eyes widened and her face lit up. “It is?” she asked.
It had never occurred to her that her fear was a belief--a belief she could let go of. She needed another person to shine a light on the belief.
Here’s another example of what I mean:
I’m now driving the fourth new car of my dreams thanks to Jonathan’s magic in helping me get clear with my desire.
I needed a car bad. The one I was driving was an old clunker that could only move if you pushed it. Okay, it wasn’t that bad. But whenever the car broke down, I broke down. Paying the repair bills was killing me. And never knowing if the car would get me where I was going was stressing me out. I needed help. I called Jonathan because of my fear of car salespeople (I had been one once and knew of their tactics). I told Jonathan what I wanted.
He said, “What you really want is often under what you say you want....What would having this new car do for you?”
Huh?
Jonathan went on to explain that what we want may be a feeling rather than a product. Focus on the feeling and it will help me get what I really want. What would I feel if I had a new car?
What a mind stopper! I developed a brain squeezing headache just thinking about it. I got off the phone and my head began to throb as if it had been hit with a sledge hammer. Though I almost never take medicine, I ate a handful of aspirin like it was popcorn. It didn’t help.
I went to see Jonathan in person. Sitting in the presence of his accepting energy, letting my pain “speak” to me, I suddenly saw the ache between my eyes as a huge black ball of tightly woven thread. Mentally a thread would loosen and I’d hear a belief:
“You can’t afford a new car.”
I let it go and another belief would unravel: “What would your Dad say about this car?” And then another thread/belief would slide out: “How will you afford it?”
And then another....and another...and another....
As these beliefs slowly came apart and left, the black ball of pain got smaller. And smaller. Within twenty minutes, the headache was completely gone! I was healed. I was clear. I was happy.
Now get this:
Though I didn’t think it was really possible, I followed my intuition and immediately went to the car dealership I felt led to visit. Consciously I “knew” there was no way I could get a new car. (I had never had a NEW car in my entire life and my credit was lousy). But I let go. I trusted.
I went to the car dealership and the gentleman there let me look around. I told him what I wanted and he said he had one car that fit the description. We walked out back and he was right. It was perfect. It was gold and beautiful and new. I said, “Does it have a cassette player?” He looked and nodded. “Well,” I said, “let’s do the hard part. Let’s see if I can buy it.”
We filled out forms and he asked me to place a deposit. I didn’t. I wasn’t confident enough to think I would get the car, so I put nothing down on it. I then left. I drove to a friend’s outside of the city and we played music all day, he strumming his guitar and me blowing on my harmonica. Later in the afternoon I decided to call the dealership.
“You qualify,” said the salesperson. I was stunned.
“I do? Are you looking at my paperwork?” I asked. “I’m Joe Vitale.”
He laughed and assured me he was. He then asked me when I wanted to pick up my car. I went and picked up the car, in delighted shock that it was mine. While I had no idea how I would make the payments, I did. It’s now been four years and I’m on my fourth new car. I’ve never been late for a payment. In fact, I mail my checks in early.
And that’s not all.
As soon as I decided to get the new car, my life went into an upward spiral of magical coincidences.
Suddenly the money I needed appeared. Clients began to call. Classes sold out. I was invited to speak to groups I had never heard of. And two publishers gave me book offers on the very same day.
In some real way, my allowing the car in my life sent a message to the universe that I was TRUSTING. Instead of worrying and wondering how I’d pay the bills, I leaped off the mountain top of fear and---to my surprise---I didn’t fall.
I soared.
But I had to get clear inside before any of this could happen. Had I gone to buy a new car when I was still carrying limiting beliefs about what I could have afforded, my beliefs would have sabotaged my purchase. I would have created not paying for the car to support the beliefs. The first thing that had to happen was clearing the beliefs.
Lynda Madden Dahl, in her book Beyond the Winning Streak, lists several limiting beliefs concerning money. Here are a few of them:
* “I must work hard for the money I earn.”
* “I need more money than I can generate.”
* “I feel helpless in changing my financial picture.”
What you want to do is replace negative beliefs with positive ones, such as:
* “Money is a natural manifestation of the universe.”
* “It’s OK to be rich.”
* “I don’t have to work hard for my money.”
* “I am destined for great wealth.”
You see, the beliefs you have were given to you when you were a child. You simply absorbed them. Now you are becoming awakened. You are at choice. You can choose to let go of the beliefs you don’t want, and you can choose to replace the beliefs with ones that better serve you.
Isn’t that a wonderful feeling---to know that you can now create your life the way you want it to be?
Clearing beliefs can be an easy process. The easiest time I ever had was when I wanted to overcome my sinus allergies.
I had suffered terrible sinus infections and sinus headaches for years. I can’t begin to describe how miserable they made me feel. I took herbs. I had acupuncture treatments. I wore air purifiers. Everything helped but nothing worked permanently.
Then one day I asked my dear friend Mrs. Kathy DeMont, a Remote Healer, if she would try to help me. We were having dinner and I looked her in the eye, slammed my fist on the table, and said, “I don’t want relief. I want healed. I want this thing gone.”
My intensity shook her. But she also realized how sincere I was and how much pain I had been in. She said she would try to help.
And she did. She went home, got quiet, and used her skills to clear my body. I was not present as she did this. I wasn’t even aware that she did anything. But within a few days I noticed that I could breathe again. I called her and asked what she had done.
“You had some negative energy in you and I scared it off,” she said.
Apparently, she was able to use her remote healing skills to clear my beliefs and my energy from a distance.
Talk about making things easy for me!
Here’s another example of clearing beliefs. This one still amazes me, because it happened to my wife and I saw the dramatic change.
Marian never learned to drive a car. I was her chauffeur for more than 15 years. I’m not complaining. That’s just the way it was.
But after seeing my changes with my work with Jonathan and other healers, Marian wondered if she could get clear about driving. She booked a session with Jonathan. Within one hour she was clear.
What happened? Marian remembered being a little girl and being in the back seat of her Mom’s car as her Mom learned how to drive. Her Mom was naturally nervous.
Marian picked up on that energy and locked onto it. While Marian went on to grow up, the little girl who sat in the back seat of her Mom’s car remained alive in her. As an adult, that little girl kept Marian from driving.
Under Jonathan guidance, Marian was able to remember that experience and release it. She realized it was an old memory and it no longer served her. She let it go. Her energy was now clear.
And today Marian drives her own car---a new one, to boot---and she loves it. I remember one night there was a terrible storm in Houston with lots of flooding. I was worried about my wife and how she would handle the weather. When she got home late that night, I ran to the garage to greet her.
What I saw amazed me. Marian was smiling ear to ear. Her face was beaming. She rolled down her window and said, “I had an adventure!”
Even being stuck in traffic is something Marian now feels grateful for. She simply sits there and listens to music.
And one day we went to lunch in separate cars. After it, I was behind her at a stop light. I saw her moving her lips and tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. I wondered if she were getting impatient. Then I pulled up closer and realized she was singing and taping her fingers to the music!
Talk about a transformation!
During the writing of this book, Marian was in a bad car accident. She was hit by a van, and hit hard enough to break the back axle on her car. Despite the shock of it all, Marian was fine, though her car wasn’t.
Now here’s the juicy part: Two days later Marian was ready to rent a car and start driving again. I couldn’t believe it. I told her I was proud of her, that many people are too nervous to drive so soon after an accident.
Marian just looked at me, smiled, and said, “Why? Driving is too much fun not to do it!”
Jonathan has a saying, “It’s all energy.” What he means is that we are energy systems. If we are clear, the energy moves in one direction. If we aren’t clear, the energy moves in several directions, and without full power.
Caroline Myss, a medical intuitive and author of Anatomy of the Spirit, talks about being “plugged into” the past. If there was a situation in your life where you were hurt, abused, or anything unfinished, you are probably still carrying around that unfinished business. You are still plugged into that old event. That means a part of your energy is still back there, reliving and probably recreating the old event.
I know this is tough to understand. But let’s use another example from Myss. Think of the energy you get each day as cash. You wake up in the morning with $500 available for the day. But you are still mad because your spouse said something mean to you last night. That’s going to cost you. You are spending $50 to keep that energy alive in you.
And say you are still upset because a friend owes you money from five years ago. Now you are spending $100 to keep that memory alive.
And let’s assume you were abused as a child. You are spending another $100 to keep that memory in you. You woke up with $500 to spend but before you get out of bed you have spent half of it on old memories.
When you try to manifest something today, you won’t have all of your energy available to make it happen. When you get clear of the old events, hurts, memories and beliefs, you will have more energy to create what you want now. And the more energy you have now, the more you will get.
You will end up like the supermodel who once said, “I don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”
Another saying Jonathan has is “The energy you give out is the results you get.”
Yes, he’s great at coming up with mind benders like that. But I think he means that the beliefs you have create the results you get. If you are unconsciously sending out vibes that attract lousy conditions, you will experience lousy conditions.
One of my clients wrote a book about children who had been molested. He pointed out that the criminal could always easily pick the person who he was going to molest. That child always sent out vibes that said “woe is me” or “I’m a victim.” Though we aren’t wearing signs on our backs or on our foreheads, somehow the energy we walk around with creates the situations we get. “The energy you give out is the results you get.”
If you find yourself recreating similar events---like my friend who has been married seven times so far---you know you are stuck in an energy pattern that will continue to create those events until it gets dissolved.
My dear friend Karol Truman, author of the great book Feelings Buried Alive Never Die, put it this way:
“It’s the continual suppression of unresolved feelings and emotions that cause the problems we experience in our lives.”
I can hear you now: “How can I get out of this pattern?” One of the fundamental principles of Jonathan Jacobs’ work is that everything is energy. It’s not a new idea. Stuart Wilde writes about it in his books. Joseph Murphy refers to it in his works. Bob Proctor talks about it in his seminars. Scientists are discovering it, as well. Nothing exists but energy formed into things we then name, like tables, chairs, houses, cars, people.
The thing is, you and I are different from tables, chairs, houses, and cars because we are spiritual. That’s the miracle of our lives!
As Bob Proctor once told me, “Although everything is energy, the difference between people and objects is that we are spiritual. That means we have the means to alter and influence other energies. We can change the energy of a table, chair, house, car, or even other people.”
Taken a step further, it means we are all connected. If we’re nothing but energy and we’re all one, then what you do affects me and what I do affects you, even if we’re miles or even continents apart.
Got it? Oh.
Well, neither did I, at first.
So let’s look at a couple of stories that may help.
One day a client of mine hired me to be his marketing wizard. He gave me a lot of money and I hired some folks to help me. All went well. Months passed. Then one day the bomb dropped.
My client suddenly sent me a letter saying I had lied to him. It was two pages of pain for me to read. It got pretty confusing and it made me dizzy, confused, and shocked. I had meetings with my staff and I even called my client. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. I sent the client a two page letter explaining my position. Next day I got another two page letter from him, almost as shocking. Finally I went to Jonathan.
“The key word is trust,” Jonathan pointed out. “You keep saying he didn’t trust you. Let’s look at how that applies to you. Where in your own life aren’t you trusting?” This is typical of Jonathan. He’ll have you look at your own life to see how what you are complaining about is relevant. In a way, you use your experiences as mirrors. You use the outer to see what you are doing inside. (Stay with me on this.)
I thought and said, “Well, I’ve never done marketing like this before. He’s hired me to direct his entire marketing campaign and expects me to lead his staff to victory. I guess I don’t trust that I can do it.”
“And that’s what your client is picking up on an energy level. That’s the signal you are sending out.”
“What do we do?”
“Are you willing to release the fear and feel the trust?"
"Yes.”
And that’s about all it took. I felt a shift inside me and I felt like I knew I could trust myself to do the job. I let go and breathed a sigh of relief. I feel it happened so easily because most of me was already clear with the problem. I d