Elevate Your Wellbeing

Disclaimer

All the information, techniques, skills and concepts contained within this publication are of the nature of general comment only and are not in any way recommended as individual advice. The intent is to offer a variety of information to provide a wider range of choices now and in the future, recognising that we all have widely diverse circumstances and viewpoints.

Should any reader choose to make use of the information contained herein, this is their decision, and the contributors (and their companies), authors and publishers do not assume any responsibilities whatsoever under any condition or circumstances. It is recommended that the reader obtain their own independent advice.

First Edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Author Express

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Title: Elevate Your Wellbeing

ISBN(s): 9781925471342

ISBN(s): 9781925471359 (e-book)

Series: Elevate Books

Creator: Harvey, Benjamin J., author.

Other Authors:

Adelin, Deborah | Alexander, Jordan |Bolto, Tina |Chin, Irene |English, Bridget| Lam, Annie | McAlpine, Heather | Morrison, Kathy |Pitt, Gretchen | Zsolnai, Debbie

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Published by Author Express

www.AuthorExpress.com

[email protected]

Dedication

To fellow learners wanting to take their wellbeing to the next level. This book is dedicated to you.

Benjamin J Harvey and co-authors

Foreword by Dr John Demartini

For over forty years, I’ve studied the art of wellness and the healing arts, particularly in relation to the mind-body connection. I have a background as a chiropractor, and I study the integration of psychology and philosophy.

In particular I’ve been involved in axiology, which is the study of worth and values. Every human being lives by a hierarchy of values, and no two people have the same ones. People’s values, or priorities, are as unique to that individual as their fingerprints or eye retina. Because of this, people filter the world through their values and perceive situations.

Something that’s of highest value is what you’re inspired from within to do. No one needs to remind you to get up in the morning. You love doing it. On the other hand, you procrastinate on the lowest values and require outside motivation.

The hierarchy of these values also affects your physiology. In other words, how the body functions. How you perceive the world according to your values affects your cells, genetics and physical condition.

There’s an underlying psychology of health conditions people have in their everyday lives. The body shows you signs and symptoms as feedback to point you in the direction and guide you to be your most congruent, authentic and inspired self in order to live your most fulfilled life. Basically, if you’re not living according to your highest values, you’re low on energy and have illness in the body. Hate and anger can run down the immune system. It’s a well-known fact that anger, loss and stress can lead to cancer. Unbalanced emotions will lead to illness, and love and appreciation will lead you back to wellness.

Vitality in life is proportionate to your vision. You’re in the highest vibration when you’re living your authentic life. When you live according to your highest values, you’re rewarded physiologically with increased energy.

Throughout this book you will find healers with various methodologies, all ultimately working to bring your body back to homeostasis. A therapist or healer who works from a space of love and gratitude of the heart and certainty and presence of mind, will affect a healing in anyone with whom he/she comes into contact. There’s absolutely a place for their healing modalities and treatments, though it’s important to realise that all true wellness starts in the mind and works through the heart.

In terms of health, I believe everyone should eat to live and not live to eat. Drink lots of water, and be grateful.

You can be a master of your destiny or a victim of your history. When you go to bed with gratitude, you wake up with inspiration. I’m certain that practicing gratitude will Elevate Your Wellbeing.

What I know for sure is that gratitude causes your heart to open and for love to flow, and love is the greatest healer in life.

Dr John F. Demartini

Human Behaviour Specialist

www.DrDemartini.com

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Contents

Authentic Happiness

Benjamin J Harvey

Freedom Through Forgiveness

Heather McAlpine

Easy Growing

Tina Bolto

Foundation Love

Jordan Alexander

Nature’s Essentials

Annie Lam

Passion, Travel and Freedom

Kathy Morrison

Managing Stress with Mindfulness

Debbie Zsolnai

The Healing Powers of Hypnosis

Bridget English

Finding Joy in Your Pain

Irene Chin

Weight for Wellbeing

Gretchen Pitt

Value Your Values

Deborah Adelin

Giving yourself permission to do what you love is the key to elevating all areas of your life.

~ Benjamin J Harvey

Benjamin J Harvey

Authentic Happiness

In his pursuit to assist people in finding the answers to life’s most intriguing questions, Benjamin J Harvey has studied the psychology of empowerment for over ten years. Knowing that reading books like the Elevate series empowers people to bring their dreams into reality, Benjamin has been assisting thousands of people across the globe to empower themselves and live abundantly on purpose.

In 2009 he founded Authentic Education with business partner Cham Tang, to help people live a rich life. As a result, Authentic Education went on to achieve something that has never been done before in the history of personal development. They received the BRW Fast Starters Award in 2013 and then backed it up in 2015 by being named in the BRW Fast 100 as the thirty-eighth fastest-growing company in Australia.

Benjamin J Harvey

Authentic Happiness

What does Wellbeing mean to you?

Wellbeing to me means a state of wellness in the mind, body and soul leading to authentic happiness.

What do you tell people who say they just want to find happiness?

A lot of Dalai Lama’s work is in relation to happiness, which is a common goal of the human race.

He understood happiness metaphysically but wanted to understand it scientifically as well, so he commissioned about two-hundred scientists of all different disciplines and asked them to go out into the scientific world and bring back the formula for happiness. After about a year or so worth of research, they all came back with a basic equation: H=S+C+V, with of course the H standing for happiness.

Now, S stands for your vibration set point. What these scientists discovered is that half of your current happiness is based on your memories, experiences, upbringing and traumas. They called it a set point, because what they worked out is that as you experience happiness, your vibration fluctuates up and down. The happier and more elated you are, the higher you vibrate, and the more depressed you are, the lower you vibrate.

Your set point for happiness on a scale of zero to one-hundred, vibrationally, might be eighty, but your resting set point might be forty, which means your happiest day would be equivalent to your most average day.

Everybody has a different set point of how much happiness they experience in a day. There are some people you meet who are just always happy and having a good time. You might have always wondered why, but it’s just because their set point is higher. It would be fair to say that one of your neighbours’ lowest days ever could be equivalent to your happiest day ever, due to their higher happy set point.

The good news is that you can work on your set point with certain techniques.

C stands for conditions of living and only makes up ten percent of your happiness.

So if you get that house by the beach you’ve always wanted, it still amounts to only ten percent of your happiness. This means that if you’re unhappy before you got that house, you’re going to still be unhappy afterwards.

That’s why you meet people who look like they have it all on the surface, but they’re miserable.

The sad thing is that people spend way more than ten percent of their time trying to increase their conditions of living. For instance, there’s something called retail therapy, where a person goes to a shop and just buys stuff like shoes and clothing. What these scientists did is track the rush people get from this by looking at different neurotransmitters, which are molecules that jump across the synapse and only go into three small categories: the small peptide, which are fast-acting neurotransmitters that are excitatory and inhibitory signal responses, slow-acting small molecule neurotransmitters that modulate the way in which the system works and the large molecule, known as protein molecules, which are neuro-peptides that are even slower.

Large-moleculed neurotransmitters get affected by the blood brain barrier, or BBB, but the smaller molecules have an ability to pass around and move through it.

So by tracking the neurochemistry of these shoppers, the scientists observed that they were experiencing happiness, which was a release of endorphins, as well as oxytocin and other chemicals inside their brain, and that the releasing of these chemicals lasted a maximum of seventy-two hours.

This means the money you spend at that shop is a three-day drug. There are actual drugs that last longer.

A lot of people are trying to get happier by pouring money into a device that will only give them seventy-two hours worth of happiness. That’s why if you can’t manage your emotions, you won’t be able to manage your money, because you’ll just keep spending it.

So if you only get a ten percent chance of being happy from changing your living conditions, my advice is to not even bother working on that. Forget about the new suit and new shoes. If you’re trying to achieve happiness this way, don’t do it. There’s no point to it. Zero.

The V stands for voluntary choices or actions made in the present moment and accounts for forty percent of your happiness. You have your set point, which is all of your past that determines half of how happy you are today. You have the shoes and new clothes you’re wearing, which translates to ten percent of how happy you are. And the remaining forty percent of your happiness is governed by your voluntary choices and actions in the present moment.

What do they mean by that?

My favourite quote of all time is by Art Linkletter, who says, Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out. What he means is that no matter what happens, if you make the best out of it, you’re going to have the best life, but if you make the worst out of it, you’ll have the worst life.

In certain forms of neurocommunication modalities, they class it as something called utilisation, where you use anything and everything to your advantage. So, let’s say you walk out to your car to go to work and find someone has keyed it. You say, Yes! New paint job! Or you’re travelling through Paris, and someone takes your backpack. Your first response is, That thing was so heavy. Even if you’re standing in an empty house because someone has robbed you, your reaction could be, My old couch was so worn out and hurt my back, and now I can get a new one! No matter what life throws at you, it doesn’t have to get you down.

Now, these people aren’t ignorant to the downside. They realise all their stuff has been stolen. They get that. But what they also understand is that it’s an instant opportunity to feel grateful.

The people that are able to do this actually transform the amygdala response, which is the split-second reaction to what life’s chucking at you. They rewire how they respond to whatever is responsible for their fears and anxieties. They know it’s there, but they just don’t focus on it. (People refer to this space between stimulus and response as the gap.)

What these scientific researchers also did was put people under Electrocardiograph (ECG) machines that measure heart cycles, brain cycles, and movement, as well as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine to track liquid movement, and showed them negative, neutral and positive images while monitoring their brain behaviour.

What they found is that happy people dwelled longer on the happy image than they did on the negative ones. They made a conscious, voluntary choice to save the happy images longer. When a happy person walks down the street, they do see all of the crap, but they focus on it for less time than the people who are unhappy. They have pre-conditioned their brain to look for things to be happy about.

Is it important to always remain positive in order to be authentically happy?

I once spoke with a man who was in Risk Management and said his job was to look at everything that could go wrong, and he worried about what that meant for his attitude.

What I told him is that just because you’re looking at everything that can go wrong doesn’t mean you have a bad attitude. I want to make that distinction. Those who refuse to look at the downside live in a fantasy. A lot of people don’t realise that if they refuse to look at the downside of life, the risk is great they’ll never get to their destination. It’ll be two steps forward, ten steps back. Seeing what can go wrong doesn’t mean you’re being negative. It means you’re strategic. It means you’re intelligent. However, those who only look at the downside and say, Oh my goodness, we’re doomed, aren’t being any more realistic. It only indicates a bad attitude. It’s those who say, How do we overcome it? who are the ones with a great attitude.

A lot of people say, That guy at work, he’s so negative, or, She’s so negative. She always points out what goes wrong, but without that person you might not see the downside. It’s those who point out everything that could go wrong but do nothing about it who have a bad attitude. It’s an important distinction.

What is The Gap?

Voluntary choice has a huge impact on your happiness. The problem is, you don’t typically have a lot of time between what life throws at you and how you respond to that.

But there’s a way you can have a voluntary choice. Please refer to the simple diagram below.

As you can see, there’s point one, which is the stimulus, and point two is the response. So in point one, you yell at someone, and in point two they yell back. The gap between you yelling at someone and them getting angry and yelling back equals how much voluntary choice you have.

Now in life, it’s nanoseconds. For instance, you get cut off, and you honk your horn. You didn’t choose this response. There was no volunteering. It was a nanosecond. The reason is because fifty percent of your programming said, That person was rude. Honk your horn. You didn’t make a choice about your reaction.

When you speak to yogis, they will talk about this thing called the gap. You want to meditate? Enter the gap.