Category: Anna’s Journey

Below I have pasted a health update that I included in a recent newsletter. In this article, I’m also going to offer the most up-to-date insights I’ve had on manifesting better health specifically:

“I wanted to write a little update as I know some of my blog readers have been following my journey of manifesting over the last 2.5 years and something kind of extraordinary has happened for me, that I do feel demonstrates the power of using the Law of Assumption (LOA). The Law of Assumption is a manifesting philosophy that is similar to the Law of Attraction.

A bit of backstory in case anyone reading isn’t familiar with my story: I’ve been a ‘low energy’ person for decades. It has held me back in my work and I’ve only been able to work part time for many years. I’ve struggled with my health long term, collected a bunch of diagnoses, until 2.5 years ago it reached a crescendo and I had a collection of symptoms that conventional medicine calls lupus.

I was debilitated with that and I took a year off work for the most part (I worked a couple of hours per week). I knew this was not how I wanted to live my life and so I threw myself into manifesting teachings in an effort to change my future.

Things have come right again. Not only am I not troubled with lupus, I have energy. I have been working 7 hour days with no problems, some days with not much sleep. I’m not tired anymore. This is a big change, because I’ve been tired for a long time (years before I became ill) and haven’t been able to work full time consistently.

It took me 2.5 years to get there and I put a lot of effort into this endeavour.

If someone looked at my path of manifesting, they would point to the practical changes I made to bring about health. However, 2.5 years ago, I was depressed and defeated by what had happened to me. I had to dig myself out of the hole mentally, emotionally and spiritually, before I could make any changes. LOA practices enabled me to do this and fuelled the changes I managed to create later on. My life, inner and outer, has changed on so many levels. Any changes I made before I did that, felt like what Neville Goddard called a ‘futile readjustment of surfaces’.

I am very excited by the opportunities this newfound energy is going to open up for me in my life.

Hurray!

I do feel a bit sad that I had been low energy for years when it could have been different. I guess I am writing this to encourage anyone who has something they’re resigned to (like I was resigned to having low energy) to not accept it. Many undesirable situations can be changed by applying the power of your mind and doing inner work.

If there’s something in your life that you’d like to change, check out my free Law of Assumption guide. (The LOA technique that I think played the biggest role in my recovery was revision.)

Recovering my health has changed the course of my life and my work. I am now very interested in holistic health, manifesting and deeply interested in how past life karma affects us (I believe the autoimmune illness I had was karmic.)

Conventional medicine played no role in my recovery.

Other diagnoses I’ve released as part of this process include: lifelong C-PTSD, eczema, seasonal affective disorder (had that for 22 years) and depression. I also no longer get severe post-viral asthma, nor do I get the awful menstrual cycle issues I used to have.

Check out the LOA guide here. It’s free and always will be.”

In this article I’m going to go into more detail on how I created better health. I’ll talk about the manifesting aspect and the practical aspect.

I am providing this info not because I think that you should do what I did in order to manifest better health, but to be transparent about what my path looked like.

In terms of manifesting work, I did:

• The DNRS program (this was a lifeline for me) — I did the techniques in that program for about 9 months on and off, and it helped to dig me out of the hole I was in, emotionally and psychologically when I was very ill
• Joe Dispenza’s meditations for 2 years, on and off, but often daily for several months at a time (then I’d take a break)
• Affirmations
• SATs
• Tons of self-love and inner child work
• Lots of the free coherence healings offered by Dr Joe Dispenza’s students
• I revised the first 17 years of my life (I grew up in a dysfunctional & abusive family and have an ACE score of 8, which I feel had a big impact on my health)

In terms of the interventions I used:

• I changed my life quite drastically. My intuition guided me along the way and told me what to do. Sadly I had to cut off family members who were causing me a lot of stress. I moved house and away from a neighbour I’d had problems with on and off. I let go of friendships that had run their course and a hobby community that was no longer right for me.
• I came off an anti-depressant that I’d been on for 2 years and I decided not to take any meds for anything in the future
• I was on the Gonzalez protocol for lupus for about 9 months — I’m no longer on the full protocol but I got a lot out of it
• I used various methods of detox
• I reduced my exposure to toxicants by filtering water, going organic and removing synthetic chemicals in various products in my home that were known to cause harm
• Cut out refined sugar and ultra processed food
• Did 3 long water fasts, of 7, 12 and 20 days over a period of 18 months with the wonderful Tallis Barker of WaterFasting.org
• Discovered a long-time nutritional deficiency (molybdenum) that had a big impact on me — my energy came back fully (enabling me to work full time) and eczema disappeared within 4 weeks of supplementation. This deficiency was causing sulphur toxicity and impaired detoxification. Molydenum is one of the co-factors for producing ATP in the body so this had a lot to do with my long-time problems with fatigue. I’d had this deficiency for a long time (a hair test I had done many years ago flagged it up but for some reason back then I ignored it.) Dr Chris Masterjohn’s work allowed me to finally connect those dots.
• Epsom salt baths
• Used a PEMF mat daily
• Did a past life regression for a recent lifetime, the story of which was very much intertwined with the illness
• Used an EE system (although I don’t know how much of a role that played in my recovery)
• Craniosacral therapy.

I’ve met people who were able to manifest better health within a couple of months through affirming. That wasn’t the case for me. It took 2-2.5 years and a phenomenal amount of effort to turn things around. The illnesses I had were deeply intertwined with the baggage from my childhood and my past lives, and it took time to unravel.

Below I answer some questions I’ve had about manifesting better health.

Does eating well and healthy lifestyle help with manifesting better health?

Yes, I think so.

Carolyn Myss talks a lot about creating “health miracles”. I’m going to share a metaphor I learned from her amazing work. She has witnessed miraculous, spontaneous healings over the years and she has some opinions and observations on why and how these healings come about (and why they don’t happen for some people.)

She compares manifesting a health miracle to ascending a 12 storey building (this building represents consciousness.) The upper storeys are where the miracles take place. People on the lower storeys can’t access the healing they need. She shared her experience of visiting a friend in New York City and that on the ground floor, the city seemed polluted, dirty and stank of garbage. When she got to her friend’s apartment on the upper storeys, there was a beautiful sunset and view, and no bad smells. Same place, but a different vantage point that completely changed the experience.

If you are very sick, eating well and having a healthy lifestyle will help to resource you to some extent so that you can ascend to the upper storeys and manifest that health miracle. But diet and lifestyle won’t necessarily be the health miracle you are seeking unless you’re dealing with a condition that is specifically dependent on diet and lifestyle (like type 2 diabetes).

Similarly, manifesting techniques will allow you to ascend the high rise building (they are like the elevator that will allow you to ascend the building) but they may not be the miracle you seek in themselves. They work because they are resourcing you spiritually and taking you to the upper storeys — that’s where the bridge of incidents unfolds, to bring you the miracle you are looking for.

So, the miracle is likely to arise in some form once you reach the upper storeys of the high rise building. It may be that the health issue disappears overnight but more likely, it will come in the form of something that appears on your path. To spot it, you also have to be paying attention and listening to intuition. You must also be willing to take action, and not living in victimhood or subscribing to the conventional medical view that your bad health is the result of faulty genes and impossible to change.

Am I still using manifesting techniques daily?

I do self-love practices (such as mirror work) daily and I also meditate daily.

I am spending a lot of time working (mostly on updating my old articles and online courses). I am making up for lost time over the last several years. I am pretty happy and excited about life, and my experiences with conscious creation have given me a renewed passion for my work. I still live a healthy lifestyle and will for the rest of my life. I do have a mental diet but it is easy. I make sure to cut off any thoughts which are not leading to a good place and I don’t have social media/the news in my life, or any other sources of mental garbage.

If you could choose the interventions which had the most impact which would they be?

• Neville Goddard’s revision technique (my life, inner and outer, completely changed after revising 100 negative events from childhood and adolescence)
• Long water fasting
• Discovering and fixing the nutrient deficiency I mentioned
• The Gonzalez Protocol, especially the detox aspect of it
• SATS, Joe Dispenza’s meditations and the DNRS program allowed me to ascend the 12 storey and manifest my miracles.

It’s been hard to narrow it down as I think many of the interventions have helped in some way.

Further Resources & Reading:

I offer a free online resource for manifesting your desired reality using the Law of Assumption — it’s a collection of online articles which are presented in the right order so that you can use them as a ‘how to’ guide. It’s quite a comprehensive resource and can help take you from A to B with almost any intention. You can find that here.

Several weeks ago I sent out a survey to my newsletter subscribers and asked them if there are any topics they’d like me to write about or questions they would like to ask.

One of the questions I got was: “does using the Law of Assumption to manifest a new outcome take a lot of work?”

I am going to answer this question in this article. The answer is: it depends.

As you may know, I have been studying Neville Goddard’s work and the law of assumption (which I abbreviate to the LOA in this article) intensively for 2 years now. I’ve read dozens of books. I’ve hung out on message boards. I’ve tested the law in my life on everything from creating change in the behaviour of people around me to manifesting a partner, to manifesting better health. I’ve made notes on the manifesting techniques I’ve used and what the results were. I’ve worked with clients in my law of assumption strategy session. I’ve observed their results.

My biggest success has been that I clawed my health back from the brink 2 years ago. I was disabled and sick with a serious autoimmune disease that was attacking my brain and my joints. I was also sick with lots of other health issues. This decline in my health happened slowly over a period of 12-15 years before it culminated in what seemed at the time like a complete loss of health and functionality.

I made a lot of progress in my health over the 2 years and lost most of the diagnoses I had. I became asymptomatic without pharma drugs. I’m not 100% asymptomatic. I still have the odd day where I feel tired or get a bit of mild pain. However, I can stop symptoms in their tracks when they do show up.

I also manifested a house in the location I wanted, using the Law. I know it works, but I’ve come to believe it’s more nuanced than 90% of the contemporary LOA content creators out there say it is. And also more nuanced than Neville Goddard said it was.

In the last 2 years I’ve seen a lot of people fail to use the Law successfully. Through my experiences and all I’ve learned, I believe some people who use the techniques of the Law of Assumption or the Law of Attraction to create change will not succeed. 

Here’s why:

We are all starting off from different points and need different approaches. Most contemporary law of assumption/attraction teachings don’t address this.

When I started my journey, my spirit guides told me that I was paying off a kind of “debt” in my health that I talked about in detail in this article.

I didn’t really understand at the time what they were talking about. They told me that it would take 2 years to pay off this debt. I assumed maybe they were talking about the damage done to my body by the illness and the ways I’d abused my body over the years. I thought maybe it would take me 2 years to repair the damage to my body and then when I got to zero, I could start building health. That’s how I interpreted their guidance.

I now understand they weren’t just talking about body damage, they were talking about karmic debt. By karmic debt, I mean that I had negative patterns and garbage that I was carrying with me from childhood, and I believe those patterns actually had their origins in past lives. Those patterns partly caused my illness.

Over the course of 2 years, I had to do a tremendous amount of inner work to pay off that debt and release those patterns.

If we talk in monetary terms just as a symbol of energy, you could say that I was $1000 in debt 2 years ago. Recently I got to $0 and have started saving money (aka generating good health and good karma.) It now feels like I’ve got the wind at my back on a beautiful, sunny day whereas 2 years ago it felt like I was walking up a windswept hill in the pouring rain and the wind was blowing in my face and slowing me down.

What I’ve observed working with people is that in terms of karmic debt, some people come into practising the Law of Assumption with -$4000 (so, deeply in debt) and others come in with $100 (so, slightly in credit but still a bit poor.) Just to give two contrasting examples of where people can be at coming into this.

Those two people are going to be on completely different paths when it comes to manifesting and will need different approaches and techniques.

The more in karmic debt you are, the less likely it is that you will be able to create big changes in your life straight away with the Law of Assumption or Attraction.

The people who don’t have negative karma and are not carrying negative patterns from childhood or past lives will usually have no problems putting the techniques of the Law of Assumption to work and succeeding at it. They can succeed with SATS, affirmations, and more.

The people who have negative conditioning and patterns won’t succeed at those techniques quickly and instead will need to do specific types of inner work to change (such as revision and other types of inner work I detail in this article), and sometimes this inner work that is required may be extensive. Once those people have done the inner work to get to “$0”, they will see more success with manifesting techniques.

I think the Law of Assumption should be called the law of reflection.

Your 3D world is reflecting you back to you. We all receive vital life force from the Creator/Source and that passes through our auric field, and our subconscious mind (which is a part of our auric field). The contents of our auric field condition that vital life force. What we assume and believe conditions that vital life force (that’s the Law of Assumption at work.) Then the law of projection causes that conditioned energy to go out into the quantum field and the law of attraction causes that energy to attract like circumstances in the 3D.

The contents of our auric field is the sum total of our thoughts and beliefs up to this point. It is what we were taught and how we were conditioned in childhood. It also contains our past life karma and patterns (which I believe govern what our soul chooses as our childhood in the first place). It’s how balanced our chakra and nervous systems are.

We attract all of that back to us in our 3D circumstances. We see reflected back to us who we are unconsciously being.

For obvious reasons I’ve become fascinated with stories of what medicine calls “spontaneous remission” — people who had terminal cancers and degenerative diseases who healed from these and then led normal, healthy lives.

One of the things that became clear in studying “spontaneous remissions” is that the people who successfully healed a health condition that threatened their life were people who healed their identity. They had to deeply change who they were being on the level of their auric field and become someone new. If you are in karmic debt (i.e. weighed down by the past) you can’t just change the way you behave, think or how you feel on a dime. Those are all downstream consequences of who you are being; who you identify as and how you see yourself.

In my opinion, to create change through the law of assumption in any area of your life, when you are in karmic debt, you have to become a new person. Once you become a new person, then your thinking, feeling and behaviour changes.

In essence, Neville Goddard was teaching the art of change and transformation, although I do sometimes feel he didn’t go deep enough with it. He said “there is nothing to change but self.”

When you change the self, you change your health, your relationships, your finances, and more.

Many people are coming into the Law of Assumption community and expecting to see change when they have karmic debt. As an example, maybe they are in a toxic relationship, with poor mental and physical health and financial problems.

In situations like those, you are not going to create massive change with techniques like scripting, affirmations and SATS in a short period of time.

If you’re in karmic debt, the work often needs to go deeper.

You need to change who you are being. But how do you change yourself? You can’t just make a switch overnight. You can’t even do it all by your (human) self. Basically you need prayer (a dialogue with the Divine) and you need grace.

I believe that you need to set an intention and then be ready for what shows up on the bridge of incidents. You essentially pray to your higher self or soul that this is the outcome you want. You give your higher self the coordinates “I want to improve my health” or “I want to earn X amount per year” and your higher self has to track a course to take you there.

Your higher self sees a lot further than you do. It knows what your blocks are and it knows what your childhood/karmic patterns and wounds are.

It knows what you have to overcome to reach your destination.

Your higher self is a branch of the Divine “tree”. It’s a piece of God energy and if you set your intention in this way, it will create miracles. Grace will be at work in your life. You will get there in time.

BUT if you are in karmic debt, a lot may be required of you on this journey that goes way beyond a bit of scripting or saying some affirmations.

There needs to be more honesty about what the journey can look like

Depending on how big your karmic debt is, your bridge of incidents can occasionally involve the complete opposite of what you asked for.

Let’s say that you are manifesting a partner but you have in the past attracted abusive partners because of your childhood traumas.

Your bridge of incidents may involve attracting yet another abusive partner so that you can finally heal from this pattern. It may bring you to your knees in the process.

If you set these intentions in earnest and you have a karmic debt, you will unleash forces that could ask a lot of you and you should be prepared for anything.

You may need to lose something before you can gain the thing you want.

This is mostly glossed over in the Law of Assumption/Law of Attraction community. Or it’s treated like a temporary inconvenience and people are told to “persist”. People often feel shame that they tried so hard at the techniques but they got the opposite of what they asked for and another disaster. But it’s not uncommon for people with karmic debts to be sent adversity as part of their process of healing an old pattern which is keeping them stuck in their lives.

This happened to me in the last 2 years. In fact, something terrible happened to me in the last 2 years; something I consider one of the worst things that ever happened to me in my life. This was a profound healing opportunity that healed my ancestral line and was a key part of my transformation.

It takes grit to work through the crap that may show up. There are opportunities in the crap — you have to to see the opportunity to change and heal an old pattern. You have to look for the lesson.

What many people choose to do is become a victim to whatever happened and say the LOA doesn’t work because it brought them the opposite of what they wanted. It does work, but if you pray for patience, you’ll manifest a line at the bank.

If you pray for something significant that requires you to essentially become someone new in order to get it, you’ll get an opportunity to change or heal yourself and it may not be pretty. You may end up on your knees with your face in the dirt.

So reason #1 for not using the Law of Assumption to transform your life:

Do you really want change? What if creating change means your soul brings you adversity as an opportunity to change? Do you still want it? What if creating change means losing your relationship? What if it means losing your job?

All of these things can happen on your bridge of incidents if you are creating massive change. Don’t set an intention to create change through the LOA unless you’re prepared for things like that to happen.

Note that it doesn’t happen to everyone or even most people on this path, but this sort of thing can happen and it did happen to me.

In addition, the amount of work I’ve put in to change has essentially been a part time job for 2 years.

I’ve had to heal my core wounds in a process that felt deeply humbling and painful.

I did long water fasts, which were gruelling and brought me face to face with my biggest insecurities.

I revised 100+ memories from childhood, but again, it was hard going.

I lost some of my friends on this path, including a dear friend I’d had for several years.

I had to cut out family members. (Some of those people were toxic or just living in a chaotic way, and the stress leaked into my life.)

I had to move house.

My worldview has changed profoundly. I don’t see the conventional medical establishment the same anymore. I’ve lost the sense of safety and security I once had in the government and authorities (especially health ones). I am more disillusioned with the world than I was before I began this process of manifesting change.

I don’t prioritise money or profit anymore. My ambitions for my material life have gone out of the window, beyond having my basic needs met.

In the end, I had to become a new person and live differently.

It probably would have just been easier to go on medication and carry on my life as it was before, like so many other patients do (or have to do because of their responsibilities like taking care of children and full time jobs.)

I am not about to take meds, and I don’t regret my path, but my point is that changing the self in this way, in order to create big change in the 3D is not for everyone.

Don’t set big intentions unless you’re ready for this.

There are no shortcuts if you’re deep in karmic debt. You have to do the work.

I realise that not everyone using the LOA is using it to fix something as big as a degenerative dis-ease. And what I’m saying in this article probably does not apply to all things you’re trying to manifest (and especially not smaller intentions like a small increase in income or manifesting a seat in business class on a flight.) But I think it particularly applies to manifesting a good relationship when your personal life has been a dumpster fire for years. Or manifesting yourself out of a serious health diagnosis. Or manifesting financial abundance when you’ve never experienced anything other than lack.

Where are you on this karmic scale? How much work do you need to put in? Read this article to find out. If you’ve had a lot of ups and downs in your life — cycles where things go well and then they turn to crap, then you undoubtedly have bad karma to clear.

I also want to say that although it can feel like a slog, the payoff of clearing bad karma can be fantastic. I have more abundance, more authenticity, more joy, more love in my life and more connectedness since I’ve been on this journey. I feel like I am now the person I was always meant to be.

Let’s have a look at the second reason for not using the Law of Assumption:

You may not be able to keep what you manifested.

I did a write up on my blog of an interview with Cynthia Stafford who manifested $112m on the lottery in 2007. Like many lottery winners, she later went bankrupt.

Here’s another problem with manifesting: in order to keep what you manifest, you must be worthy of it. Or more accurately, you must not feel unworthy of what you manifest. 

You are the only one who decides how worthy you are. Whatever you believe about your worthiness is what will be reflected back to you in the 3D.

The world or your caregivers growing up may have taught you something about whether or not you’re worthy, but essentially if you were given past negative messages about your worthiness in the area of love, finances or health, you must heal them in order to keep what you manifest.

Worthiness is less likely to be a problem for people who were brought up by loving individuals. But it can be work for lots of us who weren’t. If this applies to you, this means that somehow, in order to keep what you manifest, you have to find a way to love yourself and consider yourself valuable. You must treat yourself the way you would treat a dear friend or your precious, beloved child. You must awaken to the fact that you are a branch of the Divine and you have the Divine creative power within you, to shape your world. This is what self-esteem is — you esteem yourself as a creator and you understand the power you have. And to know yourself as a creator means you must practise using the Law. This usually means that you return to your true nature and knowing who you really are on the soul level. You may have to release earthly illusions and lies about yourself; lies you may not even know you believe in, and if you don’t know you believe in them, how do you uncover them? That’s a journey in itself.

If you think this applies to you, you might want to take my self concept quiz in this article. If you agreed with many points, you need to do some work on worthiness and self-concept.

So, if this does apply to you, this is one more reason not to bother with the Law of Assumption, unless you are willing to work on self-love. Are you willing to do that, on top of everything else?

I have been in the process of creating a Law of Assumption online course teaching people to manifest money but I’ve become disillusioned with the scale of the task at hand for all of these reasons…

1. Practising the Law of Assumption takes a lot of work for some people for the reasons I explain in this article. People may need to revise or work on themselves extensively to reach their desire — and they may need to do it on their timeline, not on mine or the timeline I set for the online course.

2. Keeping the money you manifest is another issue. How do I teach people who lack self-worth to love themselves enough to keep the money they manifested? Many of my wonderful clients have worthiness issues. This is a whole other course in itself.

3. Do people know that if you want massive change your higher self may choose to blow up your life? What happens if people require support through those changes? What happens if they regret it?

4. How do you teach all of this to people who may have no sense of spirituality outside of believing in the LOA and who use it like a magic trick to get what they want? (Loads of LOA YouTubers and people in LOA communities are coming from that standpoint.)

People who have no beliefs at all who are coming into LOA communities and treating (and even teaching) the LOA as if it’s the only thing in God’s creation. It isn’t. It’s a law that intersects with many other laws. It’s not separate from the law of oneness, the law of karma and the law of natural rhythms (which means that your manifestation “has its own appointed hour”, as Neville Goddard put it, and may take 24 hours, 24 days, 24 months or even 24 years.)

You also need to be self directed, self motivated, persistent and intuitive to use the Law of Assumption successfully. You may need to be like a detective when it comes to assessing your subconscious thinking (most of us have no idea what we’re broadcasting subconsciously). You also have to have resources (like time) and you need to be spiritually open. If you’re looking for a teacher to just tell you what to do and you don’t trust yourself and your own intuition, you are more likely to fail. Your higher self needs to be your teacher. I don’t think I could have succeeded without my intuition guiding me the whole way.

On top of this, if you really succeed in creating deep change in who you are being, what you are thinking and how you are feeling (and this is often required to change your 3D reality), you might get some pushback from your ego and body. Did you know that the body becomes addicted to the neuropeptides created by your dominant states and emotions? Joe Dispenza goes into this in depth in his book ‘Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself’. If you are someone who has been angry and bitter, or depressed and down on yourself for years, your body expects to feel the emotions associated with those states. So, when change comes, the body may rebel and try to get you to go back to how things were. When you take those habitual emotions away, some people feel anxiety, panic or sadness because of the changes. So there’s also that to contend with for some. (I experienced this, too.)

I feel guided to support people in this area but I am wondering if instead of creating a manifesting money course I will be teaching self-love or holding revision groups to support people in revising their past. Or maybe I will end up creating that money manifesting course but it will be a massive undertaking like some of my other online courses.

I know that I have many Law of Assumption practitioners in my audience. I’m interested in hearing peoples’ views on whether there is something they’d like to see from me.

I hope this article isn’t too negative but I wouldn’t be in integrity if I didn’t present my experiences as a conscious creator authentically to you. I may be overcomplicating things, but my experiences have shown me that for people with karmic ‘baggage’, creating change IS complicated.

If you resonate with this and you’re interested in releasing your karmic complexes, use this article to help you.

Further Resources & Reading:

I offer a free online resource for manifesting your desired reality using the Law of Assumption — it’s a collection of online articles which are presented in the right order so that you can use them as a ‘how to’ guide. It’s quite a comprehensive resource and can help take you from A to B with almost any intention. You can find that here.

In this article, I’m going to talk about how water fasting has helped me deeply transform myself and my life.

Just a quick note that this is just a sharing of my experiences with water fasting. Water fasting is not suitable for everyone. You should consult your relevant medical professional before embarking on a water fast. This article does not constitute medical advice. 

About 20 years ago on a trip to visit family in New Zealand, I got the worst bout of food poisoning I have ever had.

I spent around 10 days in bed, unable to keep much down, including water. I didn’t eat during that time. Surprisingly, I didn’t die (obviously) from the lack of food and water. I just dropped a dress size and mostly wasted my trip overseas lying in bed.

However, if you listen to the conventional medical “wisdom”, going without food for days is a terrible idea, and could even kill you or land you in hospital.

It is true that water fasting IS a bad idea for some people (especially people on medications, with eating disorders, underweight people and pregnant/nursing women.)

But as a species we are physiologically evolved to go without food for certain periods of time. Our ancestors did it in times of scarcity. We know that we as humans are evolved to water fast because we have a separate system of extracting energy from our fat reserves in the absence of food (ketosis) that most of us never use. We also store some of the nutrients we need to function in the liver and in fatty tissues, enabling us to be nourished to some extent even when food is absent.

I’d heard a lot about the physical healing benefits of water fasting and so in 2022, I decided to give it a go.

My first water fast was a 3 day one. Then I did a 7 day fast. After that, I did a 12 day fast, working with fasting coach Tallis Barker, since it was such a long fast. One year later, I did a 20 day water fast.

At first, I was seeking the physical health benefits of water fasting more than anything else (and there were a few.) But what surprised me most about water fasting were the emotional and spiritual benefits.

Next, I’m going to talk about what I think these benefits are.

Water fasting can reveal you to yourself

Besides the obvious hunger, the most noticeable thing that happens for me when I water fast is that my ego and “monkey mind” completely switch themselves off. 

From a spiritual perspective, this can be unbelievably helpful, and for many of us fasting can facilitate a temporary change from ego consciousness to soul consciousness. Basically, it allows us to tap into our higher selves (or God/Source/Spirit) without the “monkey mind” interfering so much.

The “monkey mind” is part of your ego consciousness. It is the part of you that that narrates your life, worries, pokes holes in things, and monitors perceived incoming threats. Some people may have a neutral relationship with the monkey mind (I once knew someone who told me he gets bored when he’s not around people, because he doesn’t really have many thoughts!)

But I think it’s more common for the monkey mind to be an active and oppressive influence in peoples’ lives, simply because it comes from that ancient reptilian part of us that wants us to survive. The monkey mind doesn’t really care about much except our survival, which is why its focus can often be quite negative and scarcity driven.

The monkey mind can often encourage us to stay safe, not put ourselves out there, be overly cautious, avoid rejection, and see everything as a competition for resources. It doesn’t help us to grow — it is more likely to keep us stuck. It can parrot any hidden, subconscious limiting beliefs back to us in the form of negative thoughts.

As I mentioned, when I water fast, the monkey mind completely disappears (I suspect this happens because it hasn’t got access to the glucose it needs to function) and this creates an unusually serene and receptive space where all kinds of interesting things float to the surface, without the ego trying to hide them from me.

In my experience, here’s what can float to the surface during a water fast:

• Hidden limiting subconscious beliefs, with absolute clarity
• Painful emotions or memories, which can then be released
• I also tend to get clarity and guidance about my next steps in life and anything that needs changing – especially the kind of guidance that Spirit has previously been attempting to get to me, but the monkey mind has scoffed at and discarded
• A spontaneous letting go of an attachment to someone or something
• Experiencing forgiveness for oneself or another spontaneously, without trying or wishing for it to happen.

I’ve had all of these things happen during a water fast, and I think they happened precisely because my ego was offline.

An Example of what this looked like

During one water fast (this was a 3 day fast) I finally became aware of a very damaging subconscious pattern I’d been running for most of my life, which was blocking me from manifesting my desires in life.

Here’s how I identified it during the fast:

I use a language learning app to practice the 2 foreign languages I learned at University 20 years ago.

I did have a vague awareness that this app often made me feel tense or bad, but it was hard for me to “pin it down” and understand why.

During the fast, because my mind was a place of peace, I had the same bad feeling using the app but this time (with no monkey mind or ego resistance blocking it) the insights came in thick and fast.

Uncovering the limiting belief behind this

One of my parents was emotionally abusive, occasionally giving me the impression they admired me but also frequently giving me the message that I was incompetent and useless.

In childhood and for the first 27 years of my life I was given the message that I was:

• not good enough
• could not do enough to satisfy this person
• didn’t do things well enough.

This message was painful and the parent in question was unwilling to consider the impact this behaviour had on me or make a change, so I ended up cutting contact with them many years ago. (Now I understand they were just stubbornly repeating the messages they received from their parent, my grandmother.)

I knew how toxic the behaviour was but I hadn’t realised how deeply this message was embedded in my subconscious mind, until I water fasted.

When I fasted, my mind was like a peaceful lake.

Up through the surface of the lake, came the clues that I hadn’t been able to piece together before and now they were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle forming a clear picture that I could see.

During this fast, I was shown scenes from my life.

I was deeply distressed doing my high school exams and obsessed with getting perfect results, but I didn’t know why.

When I did my final exams at University (studying French and Spanish – the 2 languages I was practising in the app) I was so distressed that I developed a repetitive strain injury from writing and holding my pen very tensely. I was really tense and scared because I didn’t feel I was going to measure up.

I was told multiple times by my peers and teachers at University that I lacked confidence, but I never really related to this.

When I was 22, I Googled the phrase “how to stop being such a perfectionist” but the search results didn’t really help me at the time.

When I learned the Argentine tango, I often found the learning process upsetting because it is a hard dance to learn and you can spend the first 1-2 years dancing poorly. The lack of confidence in myself and what I was capable of was really notable, and it drove my progress forward in that dance in a way that was probably quite dysfunctional. I was not learning the tango mostly out of love and passion for the dance (although I did love it), but out of a sense of not being good enough. Improving my dance became an obsession that was about gaining self-worth artificially.

I suddenly knew where this obsession came from. While learning the tango a few years ago, I had flashbacks of practising the piano as a young child and being kicked off my chair because my parent didn’t feel I was sufficiently devoted to the piano or good at it (I wasn’t and I hated it.) I sometimes felt terrified that someone was going to hit me when I was learning the tango and when I was still not dancing very well.

And worst of all, I went throughout my day with a voice narrating everything, making a list of everything I hadn’t done that day and telling me what a disappointment I was. That I don’t do enough, am lazy and the things I do do, are not done well enough. It was like a toxic black cloud that hung over my days and my life and this voice had got louder and meaner as the years passed.

These insights in retrospect seemed so utterly obvious but they still made me gasp in horror when I pieced them all together and understood the stranglehold this belief that “I wasn’t good enough” had had over my life. 

I was so habituated to this critical voice that I barely noticed its presence. I only noticed the effects of what it was saying.

And the more I heard this critical voice, the less I did because I didn’t feel good enough for the things I wanted to do. I actually think this belief ran my life, making me ill and depressed in 2021-2022. The sicker I became, the less I did because I lacked the energy. Then the vicious cycle would continue with the voice berating me even more about the lack of activity or achievement.

I am glad that I tried out water fasting because it created a receptive, peaceful space, allowing this belief to fully come out of the subconscious and to the surface for the first time. Turning off the monkey mind made me notice what it spent most of its time telling me. It enabled me to really notice, with absolute clarity:

• I didn’t feel good enough.
• I didn’t think I would ever measure up.
• I wasn’t a very confident person in many areas of my life.
• I felt that I could never “do” enough.

I did have an inkling my whole life that I sometimes lacked confidence, but I definitely didn’t understand the extent of it.

So that was one life-changing experience with water fasting and the most helpful one.

What I did to change this belief that I wasn’t good enough

I am sharing this next part because I know that this is a belief many of my clients have suffered from, because of childhood conditioning or the effects of the capitalistic society we live in, which makes us feel deficient so that we will then buy stuff to fix our “deficiencies”.

To change this belief, I made a list of all my achievements in life and when the monkey mind started up its nonsense about how I’m not good enough, I said ‘no’ and listed them all out, hammering the monkey mind with them. I included absolutely everything I have achieved, even the smaller things like “I passed my driving test” 🙂 and “I can cook.”

I noticed the monkey mind narrating throughout the day and I replied to it with loving thoughts about being good enough and all being well. I felt so good saying these things to myself and the toxic black cloud started to dissipate.

I also said affirmations such as:

I am so capable

I am so strong

Look at everything I’ve achieved

I am good enough

I don’t have to do anything to be good enough

I don’t have to be perfect to be loved

I am loved even when I make mistakes

I do enough

My best is good enough

There’s nothing wrong with me

There’s everything right with me.

I think these kinds of affirmations are particularly helpful for people who grew up with a critical/emotionally abusive/narcissistic caregiver.

Finally, to eradicate this negative belief I used my language app not only to learn languages but also as a mindfulness practice

I made the connection between my traumatic final exams at University (I studied French and Spanish) and using the languages app to practise those languages. I noticed how small and overwhelmed I felt when I considered all the French and Spanish vocabulary I’d never have time to learn and what my monkey mind said my deficiencies were as a linguist.

I noticed the tension that came up when I was using the app. I noticed the monkey mind narration telling me I’m wasting my time and to not bother. I said affirmations to counter those thoughts when they came up and I met those negative feelings without resistance, and loved myself through it.

According to studies in psychology, it takes approximately 45 days to form a new neural pathway in the brain and prune an old one. This was something I needed to work at daily, over a period of weeks, in order to change.

In conclusion…

I believe water fasting can be a very powerful tool for spiritual evolution, healing and raising consciousness. It does seem to facilitate helpful inner work spontaneously. Long (14-40 day) fasting is one of the most powerful ways to cleanse past life karmic wounds, traumas and complexes out of your body and your life. Past life (and present life) traumas are stored in the etheric and physical bodies, and the cleansing action of fasting appears to force the trauma out of these bodies for healing. The cleansing power continues for up to two months following a water fast. I have experienced this myself on my most recent 20 day water fast.

For balance, I feel I should talk about some of the downsides of water fasting, too:

• Water fasting can be hard and a slog for some people (it was for me.) I got really hungry and was absolutely obsessed with food throughout my water fasts, although I’ve noticed that people often report that water fasting is easier than they expected, so my experience may not be typical
• I couldn’t work more than a couple of hours per day or get much done around the house while fasting, as my energy was so low, and apparently this is a common experience. It isn’t ideal to do a long water fast while working a full time job and you probably wouldn’t benefit from the full healing power of a water fast unless you were resting.
• It can be depleting nutritionally (I took a whole array of vitamins and individual trace minerals for a couple of months before and after my fast, in an attempt to mitigate this.)

Further Resources:

• A Practical Guide to Water Fasting for Spiritual Healing & Transformation