May we all experience the magnificence of our own souls.
Beloved Reader,
In creating this new, revised, updated edition of The Journey book, it was my deepest prayer that you get the latest up-to-the-minute teaching and process work. It has been nineteen years since I healed from a basketball-sized tumor. This profoundly transformative and liberating healing work was originally born from that humbly life-changing experience.
Of course, over the years as I worked with tens of thousands of people around the world, I have seen what works and have also seen what doesn’t work. So the work has quite naturally, quite organically, evolved, deepened and expanded. Over time, new work birthed itself. It has not only become more user-friendly and refined, it has become more liberating, more freeing.
The Journey Method™ was not derived from some theory or conceptualized formula, but rather was born from people’s direct living experience of healing their lives: physically, emotionally, spiritually. And my wish for you in reading this book, dear reader, is that not only are you inspired by the stories contained within its pages, but also that you are catalyzed to begin your own healing Journey into the freedom and wholeness within.
It is my prayer that you come “home” to the love and peace that is your own essence, your own soul. And that you not only use this grace-inspired process work to heal your own life, but that you give the work away to your loved ones to begin liberating their lives, helping them to discover and open into their divine potential.
Since the book was first written and became a bestseller, I have been awed by how Journeywork seemed to “catch fire” wherever it traveled around the world. In the last two years, The Journey Intensives—our beginning workshops—will have been offered in thirty-five countries, and this book is now translated into twenty-three languages—and that number is still growing.
Wherever I travel globally (and most years I am on tour usually around forty-four weeks a year), I experience that, no matter which country I am in, there is such a deep longing to open into, to “awaken” to, the divine potential, the greatness that exists within all of us. There is in all of us a genuine thirst to heal our lives. And people want tools, methods and process work that will liberate them, free up their lives. They long to bring healing and wholeness into their everyday world. And they want results. Lasting results.
There is a huge wave of awakening and healing sweeping our planet right now, and I think all of us are feeling a “pull” to respond to a global imperative that we be a part of the change, the healing that our world so sorely needs during these tumultuous times. And we seek practical work, work that is real, down to earth, that gets measurable results. Work that helps clear our blocks, silent saboteurs and our limitations. Work that gets right under our skin to the root cause of our emotional and physical issues and clears them. Work that opens us into our essential greatness, into the love, the freedom, that is our own essence. We all long to have a direct experience of our own authentic greatness. We want to liberate our lives and experience the natural joy in the core of our being.
Ultimately we want to take the lampshade off our own lights and discover our own truth, find our own answers. We want to live a guided, grace-filled authentic life, lived from the love that is our essence.
And this book is designed to give you those tools, those methods, the life-changing process work needed to experience that healing.
Since this work was first published, Journey Outreach, our international humanitarian organization, was born, and for me it is a source of daily inspiration, gratitude, indeed, awe to see this healing work transform the lives of people who ordinarily could never afford to come to a seminar, let alone buy this book.
We have been graced by being invited into some of the most heartbreakingly challenged communities, and daily I marvel at the human heart’s capacity to heal, even in such adverse, seemingly insurmountable conditions. Many indigenous people around the world have welcomed us into their tribal communities, villages, ghettos, reservations and townships to help clear the results of violence and abuse, and the addictions that have resulted from the intolerable life circumstance of oppression, separation, disenfranchisement.
We have worked in the desert reservation in Ceduna, Australia, with the Aboriginal community there, and with the elders from the Maori community in New Zealand. We have fostered over one hundred projects in the African continent—in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia—and in North America we work closely with the First Nation’s People in Saskatoon, Canada. In India, our work is with orphans and the “train children” who have been abandoned by parents who could no longer afford to feed them, and we have projects all over the world with schoolchildren in their schools. We work with “lifers” incarcerated in prisons, and with medical teams working in the most intolerable, impoverished conditions.
If people in these most heartbreaking of circumstances can genuinely heal their lives and find wholeness and peace, then we certainly can. These individuals are a true testament to the work, a vision of possibility to us all, and they offer to us a compelling invitation to begin our own healing journeys.
One project that is particularly dear to my heart is a project called the Phelophepa Train Project in South Africa. Journey Outreach joined with other international charities to create a “Health Train” complete with an operating theater, a team of medical doctors, psychiatrists and Journey Practitioners. When the train pulls into a village, the villagers can board the train and receive the medical attention they need—even surgery. If they have some kind of mental challenge, they can see the psychiatrist on board, and if there is some kind of emotional block or shutdown in their lives, they can see a Journey Practitioner.
So for instance, let’s say a child has been bullied in the schoolyard. Well, no one gave that child a manual with instructions for how to deal with that kind of trauma. So naturally the child tries to cope by shutting down emotionally and withdrawing. Then when he gets into the classroom and the teacher says, “Turn to page 356 in your textbooks,” the child can barely read what’s in front of him. He can’t focus. He is too shutdown. He ends up being classed as dysfunctional at school.
With The Journey Process, the practitioner helps you get to the root cause of what put that shutdown in place, and you are gently guided to release the trauma, to come to an understanding of what took place and ultimately, to forgive so that the body and the being can naturally heal. The Journey Method helps you open up to your own innate potential so the natural intelligence can shine, once the old “cell memories” shutdowns and limitations have been cleared.
In essence, these kids are given the opportunity to take the lampshade off their lights.
So at the behest of the South African Ministry for Education (and we now work with several ministries worldwide) once the train has pulled out of the village, then a team of Journey Practitioners is invited into the schools to train the teachers in The Journey Method, so that the kids can undergo regular Journeywork. After a year’s worth of case studies, they found that children who received weekly Journey Processes averaged 91 percent to 93 percent pass rates on their exams, while those who did no Journeywork averaged only 67 percent. (Check out our website www.thejourney.com to view quite a heartrending video of this project.)
What recently has been blowing me away, as it is a sign of hope in these most challenging of times, is that many businesses and governmental ministries are actually trying to bring consciousness into the workplace—to liberate and empower their employees by using the powerful work from our Visionary Leadership Program (Conscious Company, with its Visionary Leadership Program, is now a sister company to
