Barbara McNally
Reprinted with permissing of A Real Life Magazine
Based on a Conversation with Peter Roth
When I came home from the hospital, I still wasn’t sure what was wrong with me. I was almost disappointed that no scientific test or specialist could pinpoint a disease. Even if they had made a diagnosis, it still would have been up to me to figure out the cause and the course of action. So I decided to take charge of my healing. First, I had to shake the idea that I was ill. That fear mentality can make you sick. I didn’t need a brain surgeon to tell me that my skin problems were a surface sign of something going on deep inside (in fact, brain surgeons would probably scoff at the idea). I wanted some answers. So I went to see an intuitive healer. This was a first for me, but I sensed it was a positive step. As chance would have it, I happened to know one. I met Peter Roth last year-he’s the father of a friend of Zach’s–and I like him. He’s a regular guy-married, two sons, former director of the New York Road Runner’s Club for 22 years, and chief soccer coach coordinating a group of 3,000 kids in the city. Maybe he’d be my silver bullet.
Before I even said a word, Peter started telling me things about myself and my condition that were uncannily accurate. He and I put our heads and hearts together to come up with a plan. But most of all he helped me rise out of my inner drama and see my personal angst as part of a bigger picture. I’11 tell you this-l have a lot more faith in my ability to guide myself. I thought I’d share some of his healing words with you.
We want all the answers. But we’re in this life to be constantly challenged. We wouldn’t come here if it wasn’t exciting. Yet our goal is to make life boring and have everything work so smoothly that we don’t have to think twice. To me, the real purpose we’re here seems to be to grow, and we grow by learning from adversity. It’s not smart to go looking for pain, but when it presents itself, we should recognize the silver lining pain offers. It’s normal to have negative emotions about adversity; it seems stupid to welcome it. But once you’ve got it, you can waste a lot of time rejecting it. There is a way to hold adversity that’s empowering. But first you have to find the power within yourself.
The old Gnostics said to go within to find God. That’s the idea. But it’s scary to think of going into that unknown because we don’t know what we’ll find. Maybe nothing. And we’re afraid of our power. We’ d rather think God is outside of us. Religion will interpret the rules for us and we’ll follow them. But when we think the answers are outside, we direct our lives based on outside information. Data becomes all-important. We even take it as data that there is this God outside us.
People want to give me a lot of power. They even want me to decide if they should come to see me. That’s not up to me. You can’t let any other person’s intuition override your own. That’s why I started a school, to teach people to trust their own intuition. Many times in class people ask me questions and I say, “You know the answer. You don’t need to ask me.” People give away their power. They don’t feel they know enough to handle their lives. The mechanists have told us we must know so much in order to survive. To have power, we need to be smart in facts and data and understand all the workings of this planet, including science and government. We have to know the ins and outs of everything in order to have an opinion.
Most of us feel that all the experts out there know everything and we don’t know anything. Lawyers not only tell us the law, but we let them tell us what’s good for us and what to do about it. Doctors as well. They’re not supposed to have that power. But we don’t think we have choice. We are a planet of victims. We have forgotten how much wisdom we have inside us. There’s a difference between wisdom and knowledge. The people who hold knowledge discourage people from practicing their wisdom. Because they’re the kings of data, and they don’t want to compete with us for power. When we let doctors and lawyers and scientists and politicians and financial consultants make decisions for us, we only find out afterwards that they didn’t know as much as we thought they knew, and that they can’t take the responsibility for the decisions. People feel let down. Most people want someone to blame. We give people power they can’t fulfill. There are a lot of people who want to take their power back, and it’s a fight.
We have to get back to believing in ourselves. We are the creators of our reality. When we wake up each morning and open our eyes, the world is only the way we paint it. It’s an invention, and an agreement between all of us on the laws and the understandings. Each culture makes up its reality. The question is, who is going to create our culture’s reality, the mechanists or the people with heart? We have to reinvent the world now. We were too gullible during this last century. We let knowledge have too much power. We lost a lot of the heart. We lost the feedback mechanisms that help us support and understand one another. We have to go back to our internal place and ask our souls what they need and start listening. But you can’t do this without a vision. You can’t make choices unless you believe that you are a creator of your life. That means thinking in terms of “I’m going to make myself into this. I will believe my own truths and create my vision from them.” We have to get back to trusting our hearts and honoring our instincts.
People have instincts all the time but they don’t follow them. Decisions based on instincts are not valued in this society because we have to get our minds somewhat out of the way to make them. Yet I don’t advise that you should jump whenever you have an instinct. Respect your instincts, but have some parameters. We need to employ some reasoning power and try to distinguish between an instinct based on fear and one based on opportunity. A gut instinct is more of a fear-based reaction than a heartfelt choice. A heart instinct is harder to follow because it comes from a creative place, and often you have to stand alone in your certainty and be very courageous to follow it. Your heart must be guided by your values, priorities, and responsibilities. Manage fear, and use your intuition as a flashlight. There are times when you are so attached to the outcome of a decision that you don’t have the needed clarity to make it based on just your own intuition. That’s why it’s good to get intuitive input from a partner, friend, parent, therapist, minister, doctor or healer. Part of using your intuition is knowing who you can trust. Caring feedback helps you understand your own weaknesses and the ways you disempower yourself. But you can’t allow someone else to talk you out of something you know in your heart. You may have had a domineering parent or one who didn’t believe in you, and then it’s hard to break that pattern and believe in yourself. It’s important to be aware of that and recognize when you’re being influenced by those past messages.
We have choices, but we are not sole creators. We are co-creators, trying our best to be God with God. We don’t even know where our thoughts come from. I don’t know anybody who thinks their thoughts before they think them. We can manage our thoughts, but where does the thought come from to try to manage them? It’s a paradox; we have to come from the place of thinking we’re in charge, and yet we have to surrender. In the end, whatever choices you make are not made from anything you can control, really. They’re made from the patterns of your whole life and of the universe. That’s why divining tools and astrology and Tarot and the I Ching and pendulums are effective. They all work under the same laws of patterns. All they are is windows that access the patterns that manage us. We are all a product of previous lifetimes, our childhoods, our failures, our successes, and our defense mechanisms. You have to get in touch with your center that holds all of that together. Talking with other people, meditating and praying help you to understand your inner nature and know yourself better. Healing is about going in and looking at the dysfunctional patterns we’ve created to arm ourselves and deny.
All that really counts is to live a heartful life, to love and be loved. To be in our souls. Beyond that, it’s just a dance. But we have to love without any attachment. If you’re from a dysfunctional family and think you have to love them to be happy, but you’re constantly hurt by them, you have to look elsewhere. A lot of people are stuck in the need of having to be loved by their family when the dysfunction is too strong for any result in this life.
I call myself a medium of higher consciousness. I hear information that has been shown to be very accurate about people. I’m not psychic. People who have psychic abilities can tell you what’s in your pocket, find lost things, tell you the names of family members, or how many children you have, things like that. I know people’s life issues.
And I can see how people’s pain is controlling their lives, how they’re forming their personalities to deal with their fears, and how it’s affecting their health. I can use my hands and feel the different ways a person’s life issues affect them physically. The structure of your energy field reflects information about your life. It’s uncomfortable to move our armor around and rise out of patterns, but once we see that it’s our psyches and souls that need the healing, we can start to change. Healing is a harmony of trusting our intuition, staying grounded, using our intelligence, being resourceful and being creative.
One of the ways I teach intuition is by showing people how to use healing tools. You can use the strength of the muscles in your body to pick up on inner signals. You can learn to feel the green, yellow, and red-light messages from your heart. Here’s a mechanical tool. Connect your middle finger and thumb, then put the index finger of the other hand through that hole you’ve made. Try to push that finger through where the thumb and forefinger meet. If it goes through, then the muscles are weak, if it doesn’t, the muscles are locked and strong. Strong means positive energy and weak means negative. Ask yourself something and work with your fingers. If you say yes, they should lock. If you say no, they should weaken and let the finger go through. At first, your mind is controlling your hands because it’s always known to do that. But if you do this hundreds and hundreds of times over a period of a month or two, you’re going to find that your fingers start to choose rather than your mind. I can now feel it in my body. This technique is not as accurate with issues where you have a strong attachment to the answer. You can use it to help others, too. I ask my wife or one of my students when I need input about my issues.
Our choices will often create disappointment, no matter how intuitive we think we are and no matter how much we’re carried by the great gods of the universe. But you can only make choices from who you are at that moment. Each step is a commitment, and wherever that step leads, you have to accept it and take the next step. You have to honor your choices regardless of the outcome. And yet, we all want to get beyond that and be “right” all the time. That growth will only come from these learning experiences. You have to get feedback, function as close to your heart as you can, make your own choices, and not look back with regrets. To trust your intuition, you also have to trust that you are doing the best you can. Then you have to let it go and move on. Whatever deprives us of feeling happy we call mistakes. But we don’t know what’s right for us and what the higher plan is. Who are we to judge what is the real nature of these hurdles? In the future, we may look back and bless them. Our health is a reflection of our fear of the consequences of our choices.
Much of the fear of making our own choices comes from not understanding the process. Of course we want results, but we also have to respect the life process. Instead, we have our eyes on the prize. We want it all to be our way. But remember, we are in the stream of life. Here we are, heading down the stream, focused on our dream castles-a job, relationship, situation, outcome-as the destinations. But as we move forward, the stream changes direction. All of a sudden, we seem to be moving away from our dreams. Then we despair, feeling like it’s all lost. But streams meander. When it turns back, putting our dreams right in front of us again, we feel great, on track once more. This happens over and over, and each time we have no idea whether or not we’ll ever get to our dream. But we have a choice. We can keep our eyes only on the dream and have a hard ride, crashing over boulders and logs on the way. Or we can trust the stream, knowing it’s moving us forward and will probably reach some of our dreams eventually. Then we can enjoy the ride, playing in the whirlpools and becoming an acrobatic swimmer in this stream of life. Often, when you finally reach your dream, you decide it isn’t what you wanted after all.
Or when your dream passes you by, you come around the next turn and there’s a better solution waiting. A lot of people are trying to go over dry land to get to their dream, or hoping someone else will save them from the journey. There are so many ways we dishonor the life process. We just have to choose what’s right for us each day and stop judging the consequences.
Unhappiness comes from trying to control our lives.
We have a big chance coming up as a civilization. We are moving into a more harmonic time, in the world and in ourselves. More and more people are seeking wholeness. And as we feel more centered, we feel more one with God. When we start to trust ourselves, we can come from a place of love instead of need. We can start to put anger and resentment in a context that’s healthy. We will never be totally whole, but we can be in the mode of correction, rather than denying our weaknesses and dysfunctions. The joy of feeling whole and at peace is so great that we want to share it. It’s contagious. People are driven to love.
Where there are great hearts, people find comfort. As people become more whole and at peace, communities follow. In the last century, we’ve had little experience of that. We’ve had so much disruption. But the future will be more friction-free. We won’t look so much to the experts. We will need each other’s hearts. We’ll respect authority figures who have great hearts. The society wasn’t wise in the last century. In the next, the predominant values will be cooperation, mutual respect, and intuitiveness.
It’s well known that physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health are deeply interrelated, yet few medical experts truly tap into those connections. Peter Roth, a longtime runner and the founder and director of the Heart River Center, possesses a rare ability to heal ailments of the body, mind, and spirit because he believes each is profoundly influenced by the other.