Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Up from Here

If you're holding this book in your hands, it's a pretty safe bet that there are things in your life that aren't working for you. Maybe it's the job, or the fact that there is no job. Maybe it's your relationship with someone in your family -- your mother, perhaps, or your child -- or maybe it's the woman who is (or isn't) in your life. Maybe it's a feeling of powerlessness or a dislike of what you see in the mirror. I don't know which of these it is, but I do know this: this book is here to give you courage, willingness, and tools to address and change those things that are holding you back, keeping you down and grounded, and preventing you from realizing your potential and becoming the divine person you're meant to be!

Right off, I can tell you two things to make these changes easier. First, if and when you see yourself in the pages of this book (and see the things about yourself that you try never to reveal to anybody), you don't have to tell anyone you're looking at yourself. Second, if you can't yet admit that you're seeing yourself in this book, you can recognize someone else -- a friend, a brother -- and learn from him.

This is what I hope for you: that you'll be able to see that where you are now, dark as it may be, has a purpose. It's the beginning place, and all journeys to satisfaction and fullness need someplace to start from. When you're low, there's nowhere to go but up -- and together we can go up from here.

This business of coming from a dark place to a light one is avery personal process. It takes place between you and yourself in the privacy of your own mind and the sacredness of your own heart. The only evidence that you've even read this book will be what happens in your life when you put its principles into practice. People are going to look at you and say, "What have you been doing? You're doing something different!" This book is about looking at the secret places, the silent places, the wounded places, the crying places within you. If you're now ready to acknowledge them, and accept them and embrace them, then you can heal.

One concept of healing is that it's the application of love to the wounded places, the places where there's darkness or ignorance. All of us in the human race have dark places inside, places that have been injured, chipped, cracked, stretched almost to breaking. These places require infinite amounts of love. When they get that love -- when we learn to take the power and strength of our own love and apply it to those places -- healing occurs.

It's important to realize that the fact that there's a dark or wounded side of you doesn't mean there's anything wrong. It means only that you've been living out your own spiritual curriculum, learning your own lessons, doing your own thing -- just as the Divine's plan of your life would have you do. But there comes a day of graduation when you have to move, progress, elevate, or get promoted from one grade to the next, and that movement requires shedding light on the darkness, treating the wound, refinishing the cracks -- and that's what healing is.

Love isn't anything that we do; rather, it's who we are and what we are. Our lessons, our trials, our experiences are all divinely designed to bring us to that place within ourselves where nothing exists but love.

This book will give you the courage, the strength, the tools, and the process for looking at the dark places inside yourself. The goal of this book is to encourage, assist, and support you in acknowledging that those dark, broken, chipped places exist, and in the process to give you the tools, information, and encouragement you need to bring healing light, balance, and peace to those places.

I'm not my brother's keeper; I am my brother. And if I need healing, my brothers need healing. Everywhere we look today we see that things are changing, people are changing, our approach to life and living is changing. It's not that we have to get rid of what we have and who we've become, but we certainly have to approach our lives differently. The Native Americans talk about walking gently through life, and that's a message we need to hear and heed. We as a human race haven't walked gently through our lives. Not only have we walked harshly on the earth and been harsh with one another, we've brutalized ourselves. In doing so, we've allowed (and sometimes even invited) others to join in on the process.

It takes courage to really look at yourself in order to determine what's going on in your life. Only then can you glimpse what's behind your unexamined emotions and recognize the damage they've caused you and others. It's my intention to remind you of what you already have: you have the innate goodness of Spirit within you. I want you to know who you already are: you're one in whom God is well pleased! It's also my intention to show you that much of your goodness has been covered and cloaked and undermined and stepped on. It's my prayer that you'll be able to recognize that you've done a lot of the stepping yourself, because only with that information will you be able to make better choices in the future.

Based on my experience with men, I believe that all too often they view life through a brutal, terrorizing screen...