Does that sound backwards? Does it seem like it ought to be stated that once you are happy you can feel grateful? Sometimes turning our assumptions upside down brings insight and discovery. Gratitude felt before the happiness, before the manifestation of something we want, before the fulfillment of our dreams is a surprising idea, but in the energetic sense it is the most logical thing we can do.

How grateful are you? In this sense, I don’t mean just saying thank you if somebody gives you a gift, or holds a door for you. That is just politeness, or social convention. Gratitude isn’t words, it’s emotion. It’s an openness of heart to experience that lets your spirit flow out in a particular way. If you think of emotions as indicators of how you are expressing your spirit, you can see that these emotions tell a lot about where you are headed in your life-towards something great that you’ll enjoy, or something not so good, that you won’t enjoy. Learning to focus on emotions and see what they are telling you about your energy is an important step in learning to create the life you want. And learning to nurture and magnify the emotions that serve you is an equally important step.

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If you are familiar only with Deepak Chopra’s books on health and wellness, this one will be a wonderful surprise. It is in some ways the most personal of his books-he was motivated to write it by his experiences during and after the death of his father. We see into some remarkable experiences in his life that give insight into our own.

Just a list of chapter headings gives a good clue to what this book contains:

1. The Mystery of Life is Real
2. The World is In You
3. Four Paths Lead to Unity
4. What You Seek, You Already Are

…and so on.

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It’s important to understand the difference between the feeling of wanting your desire, and the feeling of whatever your desire is. For the sake of example, I’ll use having a home of your own.

The feeling of wanting a home of your own has a particular nature. It feels like yearning, pining, longing-all those incomplete, reaching-for things. Wanting anything means you don’t have it. Wanting is a state that confirms itself. The feeling of wanting is like a void that no objects can fill. When you are in wanting you are like an empty bowl; you are always asking to be filled.

The feeling of having a home of your own, however, might include feelings of safety, warmth, comfort, happiness, sharing with friends, being anchored in the world, relaxation, authority over your own environment and many other things. This would be the “why” of wanting a home and would be the things that you want to focus on in order to create one. These aspects of your desire would have a particular resonance when you see them in your mind’s eye. You’d feel at rest, settled, completed, or energized, euphoric and happy-some kind of what I can only call receptive feeling. It would be a feeling of having done it, in a certain way.

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Epigenetics is a new branch of science that studies how genes are controlled by influences from outside the cell. Scientists are discovering more details about how DNA functions and precisely what role our genes play in the function and structure of our bodies. New findings are demonstrating how the protein sheath surrounding our DNA can be “unwrapped”, and different genes triggered or turned off, by influences ranging from emotional states to environmental conditions.

This new research flies in the face of our previous understanding of genetics as a predetermined blueprint for our health and physical condition over which we had no control. Far from the media proclaimed fatalism of a “gene for” everything from dyslexia to cancer, leading edge scientists are discovering that genes are more potential energy than directive reality.

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