I FOUGHT THE LAW AND THE LAW WON!
Part 1 of a 2-Part Series
by Bera Dordoni, N.D.
“I’ll never get thin,” Mary wailed. “I’ve tried hundred of diets, and nothing works! My body is built to be fat. I’ll never be thin again. Never!”
I nodded. “You’re right.”
“What?!”
“You’re right, Mary. It’s true. You believe it, you constantly repeat it, and thus it is so. Isn’t it amazing how easily we can create our own realities?”
“Oh, gimme me a break. I’m not fat because I think I’m fat. I think I’m fat because I am fat. Not saying it doesn’t change anything. Don’t give me that positive mumbo-jumbo. A person can’t think themselves thin. Trust me; I tried that, too. It didn’t work. Nothing works.”
“Okay, I accept that. Nothing works. You cannot think yourself thin. No diet will help. You are stuck in this state of misery and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s completely beyond your control. That’s what you want, that’s what you’ve got. Congratulations. Now, what else can I do for you?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t pull that act on me—and don’t go putting all this on my shoulders! I tell you, I’ve tried everything. Nothing works.”
I sighed. “I don’t want to upset you anymore than you already are, but if I didn’t tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be doing my job. You cannot lose weight because you believe you cannot lose weight. If you believed you could, your body would comply with your belief system. It’d have to. That’s the law.”
“Ridiculous. What law? There is no such law. Nobody can control their body just by believing.”
“Really? You’ve never noticed how thinking positive thoughts and feeling happy makes good things happen? And being in a funk where you can’t stop repeating negative thoughts feel like the world is falling in on you?”
Mary‘s eyes grew icy. “I wouldn’t waste my time. Life doesn’t work that way. People can’t control their lives. Things happen and we have to deal with them. That’s God’s plan. For some reason, He wants me to be heavy for the rest of my days.” She shrugged. “I just need to accept that.”
My solar plexus cramped. I remembered renting the space where Mary now lived, believing things simply “happened” to me without my input or that it was “God’s will.” I took a deep breath and tried again.
“I do know what you’re going through,” I said. “I’ve been there. I had cancer and heart disease. I recovered from both and learned from both. I learned that I was responsible for putting my body into the vulnerable condition where it could get sick, and that I could not only reverse those conditions but the thought-emotions that got me–”
“Oh, please!” she interjected. “Don’t give me that bologna! Maybe you can stress yourself into a heart attack, but life is stress, right? And you get cancer from cell mutations and heredity and the environment.”
Oh boy, a little knowledge…“I didn’t “get” cancer from my environment. I created the environment in my body that allowed my cells to mutate.”
“What?”
“Look, most of us let our thought-emotions happen randomly, unconsciously. I know I did. Without conscious direction, they controlled me—until I stopped and thought about what I was thinking. When I did, I could refocus them in a positive direction. Your weight is the same thing. How does it make you feel?”
“Crummy.”
“Exactly. So you focus on feeling crummy, a negative thought-emotion, instead of on how great you’d feel being thin. All your thoughts and conversations are about how you can’t lose weight, right?”
“So?”
“So you stay heavy. Your body manifests your thoughts.”
She blinked at me. “I think about losing weight all the time. If my thoughts controled my weight, I’d be skinny by now.”
“No, you wouldn’t, because you never think about feeling great skinny, you think about how you can’t lose weight. You program yourself to stay heavy. Your body cannot release the pounds because you’ve told it, over and over again, not to. Henry Ford said it: ‘Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.’ You believe you can’t lose weight, so your body doesn’t release the excess. Bingo! You’re right. You control your life without even realizing it.”
“What a horrible thing to say! You don’t know what it feels like! I’ve tried everything! Shots, pills, everything! Nothing works! It’s not fair! And it’s not my fault!” she wailed.
“This isn’t about blame, Mary! It’s about belief! And I know exactly how you feel. I used to be forty pounds overweight myself!”
“You? Forty pounds? You’re lying. How did you lose it?”
“It’s true, I promise. I was enormous, a big, bloated, sick tub of flesh. Nothing I tried worked. I knew I’d be fat the rest of my life. And so I was, all day, every day, right up to the moment I decided I could and would get thin. I announced to myself, to God, to the universe that I was losing weight. Not going to lose it— not that sometime-in-the-future trap—I was losing it, right then, that moment and from then on. I decided to believe. And the pounds started dropping off.”
She snorted. “Buncha new-age, airy-fairy bull.”
“Mary, look at me!” I stood up. “And look at how I was before.” I pulled an old photo from my wallet and showed it to her. Her eyes widened.
“Yeah, I was fat and flabby. Couldn’t walk half a block without panting. Had to use a motorized cart in warehouse stores. Couldn’t stand on line more than a few minutes. I knew I was a mess, and I knew it was too late to lose weight or get fit or change my life.”
“I know that feeling,” she muttered.
“Then I learned my brain is good for things beyond what I learned in high school and college!”
She laughed. “I was never any good in school.”
“Me, neither. But that doesn’t matter, because I learned that focusing my thought-emotions to manifest positive changes in my life is far more effective use of my brain than storing facts. I learned that deciding to be positive, focusing on the positive, and directing my thought-emotions toward positive impressions could give me the life I wanted.”
She tilted her head “Keep talking.”
“Our minds are so strong, Mary, and we have a God-given capacity to manifest whatever we focus them on. If we believe something bad can happen to us at any moment, something bad will likely happen. But if we believe we are healthy and thin, our body has no choice but to manifest that reality! It’s the law!
“Once I understood how to focus my thought-emotions, I decided I was thin and healthy. That’s what it took: a decision to accept a belief! Before I knew it, I started acting thin and healthy. My body, directed by my thought-emotions and actions, dropped the weight and became healthy.”
Mary slapped the table. “Ha! You almost had me until you started talking in circles.”
I sat back. “Fine, Mary, you win. You’re obviously comfortable being miserable. Every woe-is-me phrase you utter reinforces it. You claim being thin would make you happy, but you can’t get thin, so you can’t be happy. A self-fulfilling prophesy.”
“Go to hell!”
“No, I won’t join you there. But I will give you a hand up. Ford wasn’t the only one who talked about thought power. Remember Ben Franklin? “God helps those who help themselves.” And Norman Vincent Peale: “It is a well-defined and authentic principle that what the mind profoundly expects it tends to receive.” You read the Bible? It’s right there in Mark 11:24: “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Proverbs 17:33: “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.
“You can do this, Mary. You can change your life. You can lose weight, be healthy, enjoy the wonders of the world. But you have to want to, decide to, and believe that you can.”
Mary stared at me without speaking. Then she said, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore” and left.
**
The story above is both truth and fiction. I made up the characters, but I deal with this situation and various incarnations of “Mary” all the time. They always leave me feeling a sense of loss, because it’s my nature and calling in life to help people. On the other hand, some people’s negativity is so deeply ingrained I’m relieved when they take it away.
Never underestimate the power of your thought-emotions. They create our life experiences, whether we realize it or not. We must learn to make them work for us, not against us.
Next time, we’ll talk about how to do just that.
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Dr. Bera Dordoni, N.D., lovingly referred to as the “Wellness Whisperer,” is author of the highly acclaimed book “I Have a Choice?!”, nutritional counselor, and a naturopathic doctor who has over two decades of experience counseling clients with ailments ranging from allergies to cancer to numerous life-threatening dis-eases. She incorporates the laws of attraction to help her clients accomplish their health goals and now holds workshops, wellness retreats and natural health classes in the Ramah area. To request a consultation or learn more, visit www.bastis.org or call 505-783-9001.