by Shakti Gawain: New World Library cofounder Shakti Gawain’s clear writing style and vivid examples make her international bestseller Creative Visualization easy to apply to your personal needs and wants…
Her groundbreaking work has found enthusiastic followers in every country and language in which it has been published, and Shakti’s simple yet powerful techniques are used successfully in many diverse fields, including health, education, business, sports, and the creative arts. Whether you read it for general inspiration and empowerment or to achieve specific goals, Creative Visualization remains a profoundly powerful resource from a uniquely warm and wise teacher. We hope you’ll enjoy this short excerpt from the 40th Anniversary Edition of the book.
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Your spiritual source is the supply of infinite love, wisdom, and energy in the universe. For you, source may mean God, Goddess, universal intelligence, the Great Spirit, the higher power, or your true essence. However we conceptualize it, it can be found here and now within each of us, in our inner beings.
You can think of contacting your source as connecting with your higher self, the wise being who dwells within you. Being in contact with your higher self is characterized by a deep sense of knowingness and certainty, of power, love, and wisdom. You know that you are creating your own experience of life and that you have the power to create the experiences most important and necessary for your own learning process.
We have all had experiences of being connected with our higher selves, although we may not have conceptualized it in that way. Feeling exceptionally high, clear, strong, “on top of the world,” or “able to move mountains,” are indications of being connected with your higher self; so is the experience of “falling in love” . . . when you feel wonderful about yourself and the world because your love for another human being is causing you to connect with your highest self.
When you first become consciously aware of the experience of your higher self, you will find that it seems to come and go rather sporadically. At one moment you may be feeling strong, clear, and creative, the next moment you may be thrown back into confusion and insecurity. This seems to be a natural part of the process. Once you are aware of your higher self, you can call on it whenever you need it, and gradually you will find that it is with you more and more of the time.
The connection between your personality and your higher self is a two-way channel, and it’s important to develop the flow in both directions.
Receptive: When you quiet your personality during meditation, and come into a “being” space, you open the channel for higher wisdom and guidance to come to you through your intuitive mind. You can ask questions and wait for answers to come to you through words, mental images, or feeling impressions.
Active: When you are experiencing yourself as the co-creator of your life, you make choices about what you desire to create, and channel the infinite energy, power, and wisdom of your higher self into manifesting your choices through active visualization and affirmation.
When the channel is flowing freely in both directions, you are being guided by your higher wisdom, and based on that guidance, you are making choices and creating your world in the highest, most beautiful way.
Almost any form of meditation will eventually take you to an experience of your spiritual source, or your higher self. If you are not sure what this experience feels like, don’t worry about it. Just continue to practice your relaxation, visualization, and affirmations. Eventually you will start experiencing certain moments during your meditations when there is a sort of “click” in your consciousness and you feel like things are really working; you may even experience a lot of energy flowing through you or a warm, radiant glow in your body. These are signs that you are beginning to channel the energy of your higher self.
