It sounds crazy, but in 1986 I had the privilege of getting run over by a truck in a triathlon. When I received the diagnosis that I broke six vertebrae, that I had bone fragments on my spinal cord, and that I probably would never walk again, I had to make some important decisions. After I opted against a radical surgery recommended by four different experts and facing the prognosis of paralysis, I left the hospital with only one conviction: “The power that made the body, heals the body.” My mission was to make contact with this innate intelligence, then give it a template or a design with very specific orders and finally surrender my healing to this unlimited power.

I really had nowhere to go at the time of my accident and I did not have many things to do, so it was the perfect opportunity to experiment with using my mind to heal my body. For two hours twice a day I went within and I began creating a picture of my intended result: a healthy healed spine. If my mind wandered to any extraneous thoughts, I would start from the beginning and do the whole scheme of imagery over again. I reasoned that the final picture had to be clear, unpolluted, and uninterrupted for this intelligence to take my condition to the next level.

Over the course of ten weeks, I experienced a wonderful and veritable healing. At eleven weeks, I was back in my office seeing patients again without surgery or a body brace (both of which were recommended by the physicians at the time of my injury). As a result of this experience more than 20 years ago, I have spent the remainder of my life investigating and researching the mind-body connection as well as the concept of mind and matter.

I learned some pretty profound lessons as a by-product of my injury. I know that we are defined by our adversity. When we are confronted with lifetime trauma and crisis, we must change our mind to truly address that situation. We must begin to think, act, and feel in new ways in order to produce a new and more profound reality. In difficult times, we must look to see what piece of philosophy or intellectual understandings that we know, but have not experienced, and apply that knowledge to create a new experience. For example, in my situation I intellectually understood that the body heals itself, but I had to apply every bit of philosophy that I knew in order to take it to the next level and beyond, in order to create a true experience with healing. The persistence, conviction, and focus on any potential future lies within the mind of a person, as well as the mind of the infinite potentials in the quantum field, which means both of these minds must work together in order to bring any future reality that technically already exists.

Quantum physics tells us that mind and matter are not separate elements. In fact, your subjective mind has a true effect on the external objective world. If we can accept this idea then we should reason that by changing our mind, should produce some changes in our world. And if you can begin to sharpen your abilities to observe some desired destiny, your life begins to reorganize itself. And the beauty your true change that the new experience will find you.

Can we take the time to ask ourselves one question in the morning before we engage in our life? “What is the greatest ideal of myself that I can be today?” If we were patient enough to wait for an answer, we would begin to think and feel differently than we would if we just woke up and remembered ourselves as the same person. As we experience new thoughts and then we combine them with an elevated emotion, then we are destined to behave differently throughout our waking day. After we sincerely take the time to do this process with intention and focus, we’ve changed our mind. In other words, according to neuroscience, mind is the brain in action. To think differently is to make the brain work in new and different ways. And when we make the brain work in new ways, we have literally just changed our mind. And lastly, if we can commit to not arising to face the day until we feel like that new ideal, we would be conditioning the body to finally work together with our new mind. Depending on your circumstances, this can be an easy task, or it can seem insurmountable. The key is to commit to that ideal, in every moment regardless of what your environment tells you. To align to a concept in thought and emotion means you are using your innate capacities for creation. And when we have mind and body working together, we have the power of the universe behind us…and then when we walk through our life that day, something different should be different in our world as a result of our efforts…and no one is excluded from this phenomenon.

Since the hit movie What the Bleep Do We Know!?, I have been pretty busy traveling around the world, talking to audiences about how our conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings are the very blueprints that control our destiny. I have also been fortunate enough to spend the last ten years investigating hundreds of actual medical case histories in which ordinary people experienced a spontaneous remission from a host of different diseases. As a result, I wrote a book a few years back entitled, Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing of Your Mind, in which I discuss the relationship of the brain, the mind, and consciousness with the health of the human body, as well as the nature of reality. I now know that there is a true science and biology to personal change. That everyone, at any time in their life, can change the way they think and feel, and when true change occurs in both the mind and the body, the natural side effect of that internal change produces measurable external effects in those individual’s lives.

I truly believe that every person is a divine creator. That independent of our race, our gender, our culture, our social status, our education, our religious beliefs, or even our past mistakes; there is a power within each of us that is common to every human being-and we are all connected to it. This invisible consciousness is both personal and, at the same time, universal. It is the giver of life. This refined mindful energy is conscious enough to support, maintain, protect, and heal use very moment. It keeps our heart beating hundreds of thousands of times per day; creates over 60 million cells every minute; and organizes hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions in one cell every second, just to name a few. It is also the same intelligence that creates supernovas in distant galaxies, that keeps the planets rotating around the sun, and that brings the lily into bloom. When we take the time to develop a relationship with this mind, when we make contact with it, when we use it to create desired events in our future, when we ask it to intervene in our lives and finally, when we express this power, love, and intelligence through us, we become more like it-we become divine.