Read an Excerpt
Divine Prescriptions
Using Your Sixth Sense â" Spiritual Solutions for You and Your Loved Ones
By Doreen Virtue St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2000 Doreen Virtue, Ph.D.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7786-3
CHAPTER 1
Heavenly Solutions for You and Your Issues
You've probably read about or experienced instances of heavenly comfort and miraculous intervention. They're the sort of goosebump-inducing story in which a person's life is saved or healed thanks to the help of some mysterious force, voice, or person. These events help people to have faith that they are watched over and guided by God and guardian angels. The angels intervene when necessary in miraculous ways.
However, God and the angels don't just work miracles to pull people out of life-threatening situations. The heavenly hosts also are full of practical, prescriptive advice about how to solve personal problems, heal emotional hurts, and resolve difficult dilemmas. One of the most common, and perhaps most important, ways that heaven intervenes on behalf of human beings is through giving them what I call Divine prescriptions — angelic remedies for the hurts and challenges of everyday living.
In ancient spiritual texts, God and the angels are likewise shown as giving practical guidance for the problems of daily life. For instance, the Torah (or biblical Old Testament) describes sound techniques for conflict resolution among family members and others, healthful suggestions for food preparation, marital harmony, and recommendations for raising both cattle and crops. Heaven didn't stop offering this kind of advice when the Bible was completed. Some 2000 years later, God and the angels continue to offer Divine prescriptions for how people can best handle their personal difficulties.
God's Heavenly "Dear Abby"
If you give the angels permission to deliver remedies to you, and if you learn to open yourself to the four channels of Divine communication (covered later in this chapter) and act on the counsel you receive via your sixth sense, you will ride through life on a cushion of angelic support. The angels' prescriptions are God's gifts to people. When you accept and make use of their guidance, you benefit in countless ways: You achieve success (whatever success means to you), you are more at peace with yourself, and you enjoy more fulfilling romantic and family relationships.
Let's face it. Everyone is presented with difficult, painful challenges from time to time, problems that range from the merely irritating to the overwhelming and devastating. Love, finances, children, health, relationships — who hasn't fallen into despair and suffered over one or more of these life areas? You try your best to meet each challenge as it comes. But often it seems as though one problem continuously follows another. And some problems, such as the loss of a business or a major difference of temperament and viewpoint between marital partners, seem impossible to resolve.
Millions of self-help books, therapy sessions, and talk shows later, the human race still struggles with the same challenges it struggled with when the psychological self-help genre was conceived. Though well-intentioned, these human methods have failed to make any measurable difference in helping us become healthier, happier people precisely because they are man-made and therefore a product of human limitations and frailties.
The only approaches to psychological healing I have found that produces profound and lasting therapeutic effects involves a spiritual approach. No matter what the struggle is about — an unhappy marriage, rebellious children, depression, addictions, financial challenges, aging-parent issues, a dead-end job — the angels have a Divine prescription for reaching a successful, healing conclusion. As a professional, I have seen their advice help heal my clients. In fact, you might think of angels as the heavenly equivalent of "Dear Abby," dispensing wise, beneficial counsel in response to questions people have asked here on earth.
During my therapy sessions, the angels have given prescriptive and practical advice through me to my clients and audience members on a host of issues. Quite often I've applied these prescriptions to my own life, and they have helped me find solutions to seemingly insoluble problems as well as guide me toward a healthier and happier life. I've also passed along prescriptions that have helped my friends, family members, and other clients as much as it had helped the person for whom it was originally intended. This convinced me that the solutions and strategies the angels provide could be applied successfully by others in similar situations.
In this book, particularly chapters 2 through 7, you'll find nearly fifty Divine remedies the angels have given my clients for resolving some of the most common and painful problems people are likely to face in life today.
I have found these prescriptions to be psychologically sound approaches to problem solving, healing, recovery, and self- growth. Moreover, I've seen those who follow this angelic advice experience greater healing, energy, and peace. They know they are watched over, loved, and protected. The sense of inner serenity this creates draws wonderful people, opportunities, and experiences into their lives.
The Importance of Asking
To receive Divine prescriptions for your problems, there is only one requirement: You must consciously ask heaven for them (whether out loud or silently). Simply think of the angels, then mentally request, "Please help me with [fill in your issue]." Most prayers result in your receiving Divine prescriptions almost at once. When you skip this all-important first step and fail to ask explicitly for angelic assistance, you gag and shackle heaven. You can want Divine counsel, yearn for it, long for it, need it, desire it with all your might, but if you don't direct a conscious request to heaven, angelic guidance won't be forthcoming.
The angels want to give you the benefit of their guidance. Want is the operative word, since angels are not allowed to violate the free will God granted to you and all other human beings by forcing their help on you. That's why it is so important to ask for their aid and then keep yourself open to receiving it. The only exception is a life-endangering situation — such as an impending car crash — before it's your time to go. Even then, the angels can only help you if you let them.
One evening the angels, with their unique brand of humor, taught me an unforgettable lesson about the importance of consciously asking for their help. I was in North Scottsdale, Arizona, for one of my weekend seminars. Friends dropped me off at a health club on Saturday night. They offered to pick me up later, but I said I'd take a cab back to our hotel. Following my workout, I used the health club's phone and Yellow Pages to call a cab company. The first taxi dispatcher said, "Oh, we don't service North Scottsdale." The second cab company explained they weren't familiar with the street the gym was located on. A third taxi company said, "Well, we're very busy tonight, so it might take us forty or fifty minutes to get out there."
Dejected, I decided to walk to my hotel. After all, I rationalized, I'd spent an hour on a treadmill; what was another hour of exercise? Still, I realized it would be a difficult trek. For one thing, there were no sidewalks in that part of town, and I had to walk over uneven, rock-laden lawns in the dark. Tripping and stumbling, I decided to search a busy nearby street for a taxi or bus.
The fifty-mile-an-hour traffic whizzed by me, and there was no sign of public transportation. Too residential a neighborhood for buses and taxis, I concluded. I groused silently to my angels, "How come you guys let me down after I spent all day teaching people about angels? I did my part, how come you're not helping me?"
At that moment, I heard the angels' sweet but wry inner reply: "Excuse me, but did you ask us to get you a cab?"
I gasped in realization. I hadn't asked the angels to get me a taxi. No wonder I was having such difficulty. I was trying to solve the problem on a human level, without requesting aid from above. "Consider this my official request right now, dear angels," I mentally replied. "Please send me a taxi, right away."
No more than two minutes later, I turned around to see a big, brand-new yellow cab in the lane next to me, cruising along at about thirty miles an hour. I reached my hand out as if hailing a New York cab. The driver pulled over immediately.
I smiled as the driver comfortably took me to the hotel. On the way he casually mentioned how lucky it was that he happened to be driving on that street. "Cabs normally don't service this area at all," he said nonchalantly.
Since that incident, I have always remembered to consciously ask the angels to involve themselves in every aspect of my life.
I can't overemphasize enough the importance of asking your angels to help you find remedies for anything that challenges or troubles you. I realize that many people balk at asking God for help with anything less than a life-endangering situation. But remember: During crises, God doesn't need your request or permission to help you. He has already sent angels to you by the time you utter cries for help. It's during the everyday events that God and the angels need your permission to intervene.
Of course, some people hesitate because they are afraid they will do something wrong. They worry that God will ignore requests that are phrased incorrectly, or that there are special ways of wording their question for specific circumstances. To this the angels say, "You don't need to use formal invocations to call upon us for help. We appreciate the intention of your desire to use what you call proper protocol. However, we are swift to come to you when you call, and to provide remedies for all that troubles you. All that is needed is a thought, a word, or a vision. The words within this request really do not matter. The heart of the matter — that you're asking us for help — is all that counts."
Although you may feel awkward or clumsy when you first begin asking the angels to help you, please don't worry. As long as your intentions are to connect with God and the angelic realm, you can't make a mistake. Even though it may seem as though they can't hear your question, rest assured that heaven does hear.
Asking for heavenly assistance, sometimes called praying, is a necessity to receiving it. It doesn't matter if your prayers are formal, conducted in a church, temple, or synagogue, or are private, heartfelt appeals to God. No matter what your religious background is, even if you are an agnostic or atheist, whether you have lived a life of blameless service or a life of greed, manipulation, and dishonesty, heaven answers prayers. (Of course, God won't answer the prayers of "bad" people to help them out in their "badness," but the angels will offer advice on how such individuals can find the path to becoming a better person.) Heaven doesn't discriminate in any way and answers all requests for Divine prescriptions.
How Prayers Are Answered: Comfort, Miracles, Prescriptions
In truth, God sends His help in three different ways, depending on what you need or have asked for. Your prayers may be answered in the form of heavenly comfort, miraculous interventions, or Divine prescriptions.
Heavenly comfort. You are depressed, worried, angry, lonely, fearful, or suffering intensely from some other negative emotion, and you ask heaven for help. God and the angels come through for you with a message that is comforting and reassuring. It might be something as simple as a sudden, intense feeling of peace and well-being. Or, you might receive a dream that is meaningful and reassuring to you. It might be a sudden insight that puts the situation into a whole new perspective. Or, a friend might say just the right thing to make you feel better. You might see a sign — a butterfly, a rainbow, or a feather that falls at your feet — that has special meaning for you alone.
Miraculous interventions. You are in the midst of a crisis and pray for help. Miraculously, you are saved not through any effort of your own, but through a fortuitous series of events. Perhaps a stranger appears from out of nowhere to give you directions when you are lost on a lonesome highway, then disappears immediately afterward without a trace. A voice suddenly screams in your ear to "Stop now!" as you approach a green light at an intersection, and you narrowly avoid a collision with a car running the red light. God and the angels always act instantly to try and intervene when mortal danger is imminent.
Divine prescriptions. You have a specific problem — how to raise the money for your daughter's wedding, how to stop smoking cigarettes, how you can help your child improve his math grades, how to get through Thanksgiving with your hypercritical family, how to alleviate your super-high stress level, how to decide which of two seemingly equal job opportunities to take, how to stop meeting losers and find Ms. or Mr. Right — and you request God and the angels to help you solve it. Shortly afterward, perhaps through an inner voice (or an actual physical voice you hear) or through an article or television show, you happen across the exact remedy to your problem. The solution also may be delivered into your hands through something a co-worker says, or through your finding a qualified therapist or recovery group, or through some other means temporarily impressed as a conduit for heavenly information.
Why People Block Out Divine Prescriptions
Some people complain to me that even though they have asked for angelic counsel, heaven has let them down and never replied. Usually, when I ask if they have had intuitions, heard one song repeatedly in their heads, or had intense dreams about the subject of their concern, they answer yes. Heaven has been sending them Divine prescriptions all along, but they have been unconsciously blocking out the message. Rather than God turning a deaf ear upon them, they have been turning a deaf ear upon God's guidance.
Why would people put blinders on their sixth sense and block out anything as benign and healing as God's heavenly remedies? Because, deep down, they mistrust the angels or are afraid of the changes they might be asked to make in their lives and lifestyles. This deep-down part is the lower self, or ego, and it is composed of 100 percent pure fear. It is afraid of everything ... of God, love, angels, and happiness. Mostly, the ego is afraid that if the person changes or loses his fears, the ego will disappear.
Thus, the ego keeps raising fears. After all, you've followed your intuition before, and it didn't work out. What if you're wrong again, and you make your life worse than it is right now? What will other people say and how will they react? They might laugh at you, leave you, or even sue you. Like a dog chasing its tail, your ego is constantly at war with your higher self, which instinctively trusts and obeys Divine messages, guidance, and prescriptions. Some of the fears that the ego raises to block awareness of Divine prescriptions are discussed below.
FEAR OF OFFENDING GOD
People are prevented from hearing the Divine remedies because of their concern that they somehow will be breaking a rule of their religion. Those raised in religions that emphasize rules wonder whether it's safe or allowable to talk directly to angels. The fear is that by following angelic advice, they will be offending God and perhaps be punished. They ask me, "Is it all right to talk directly to angels, or should I direct all of my requests only to God?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Divine Prescriptions by Doreen Virtue. Copyright © 2000 Doreen Virtue, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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