Gabrielle Bernstein – Miracles Now
OMTimes: In technique #29 you write about “You are not your habits”. How do you determine for yourself whether or not a habit is good for you?
Gabrielle Bernstein: That’s a nice question. You have got to be honest with yourself and everyone is different. Someone like myself who tends to lead more into addictive behavior, I work really well with abstinence and I can see when a habit becomes an addiction. You have to decide for yourself “Am I relying on this? Am I powerless over it?” It’s like in the “twelve steps” they say “am I powerless over this or is my life unmanageable because of this habit?” If you notice one of those two things then it is likely a habit that has gone in the wrong direction and is leading into addiction. If it’s not unmanageable and you can go without that coffee one day, you’re okay. You can have coffee in your life [laughing now]. I think it really depends on your own personal well-being.
OMTimes: When you talk about God, what do you exactly mean by that? Do you believe in a religious God or something different?
Gabrielle Bernstein: Everything I teach is non-denominational and so God is not a religious term for me. God is a spiritual term. God for me means the ever-present energy of the Universe, the energy that we are, the energy that is around us, the energy that supports us and guides us and the energy we all have access to when we choose to tap into it and consciously vibrate with it. I can use the word God interchangeably with the word Spirit, Guide, Energy or the word Universe. I actually don’t get too caught up in semantics. I prefer to just talk about it as a presence that we are and that when we get out of alignment with it is when our life falls off course and when we are in alignment with the energy of God, we are living on purpose and connected and happy and healthy and holy.
OMTimes: Personally, I loved reading about handling your fears (#41) because I believe that many interactions in our society are based on fear. You talk about living through tragedies and how we are trying to hide from it, but how do we recognize our smaller fears in our day-to-day lives, because these are the fears that often paralyze the person who we truly are.
Gabrielle Bernstein: There are a lot of lessons in the book that help you become the witness of your fear and in the experience of witnessing your fear you can start to make the commitment to try to shift out of it or try to meditate through it. When we are not witnessing the fear we get stuck in the fear and we believe we are the fear and so a lot of lessons throughout the book are really just about becoming that non-judgmental witness of the fear so that you can see it not as you but as something outside of you.
OMTimes: Somewhere in your book you write about “Breathing like a dog and boost your immune system”. It was too funny and I should have realized the impact before I started trying this because I made a complete fool of myself. Can you elaborate on this technique?
Gabrielle Bernstein: This is a kundalini meditation that was taught by yogi Bhajan and the concept is when you breathe like a dog your energy starts to reorganize. All of the Kundalini meditations are about balancing the glandular system so that the pineal gland, which regulates our entire glandular system, can be balanced. That is the message in this meditation, that it is balancing the pineal gland. It is funny but it really works. So if you have a weak immune system for example, it is a really good thing to do this when you are getting on an airplane or doing something that might weaken you.
OMTimes: Can you share with us an example of a profound miracle that happened in your personal life?
Gabrielle Bernstein: I experience miracles every day. Something as simple as the miracle of forgiving someone, letting a grievance go or something greater like being sober nine years, the miracle of releasing an addiction. I’ve been off sugar for 130 days – that is a miracle. The miracle of letting go and releasing. I am now in the middle of launching the book and it is a miracle that I am released to the outcome. That is a miracle.
