Barbara De Angelis - Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment

I offer these words to you,
my Beloved One,
who has opened the most secret doorway in my heart
and taught me the meaning of
true bliss, true peace,
and true love.

The most auspicious moment of your life is when you make the commitment to know the Truth, a commitment so firm there is no turning back.

G URUMAYI C HIDVILASANANDA

I magine a life in which you woke up every morning excited about the day ahead and certain that, when you went to sleep at night, you would be able to say, This was a great day!

Imagine knowing that no matter what challenges you faced in your relationships, your work, or your family, you would always remain centered, calm, and clear

Imagine having a source of confidence and wisdom inside yourself that you could count on to be a constant wellspring of strength and inspiration

Imagine what it would be like if you knew exactly what you needed to do to make each and every moment of your life one of great happiness, great contentment, and great peace

The experiences I describe here arent simply impossible dreamsthey are possible, very attainable realities. They paint a picture of a life that, perhaps, has only existed as a dream youre sure could never come true. But it can. I wrote this book to help you create that kind of life for yourself, a life that feels like it is working, like it makes sense, and, most importantly, a life in which you are living and loving as the powerful, fulfilled person youve always wanted to be.

This book is about something every one of us seeks in our hearttrue freedom, inner freedom, the kind that saints and mystics have written about throughout the ages. This kind of freedom is not the freedom to acquire more of what you can eventually lose, or to experience more of what will eventually change, or to do more of what will eventually not matter. Instead, its the freedom that comes from knowing how to discover your own state of joy and contentment and protect it from all of lifes ups and downs. Its the freedom that comes from knowing how to build a center of emotional and spiritual self-reliance on the inside, a center that will allow you to live every day with greater joy, greater strength, and greater peace. Most of all, its the freedom that comes from finding a source of security and happiness inside yourself, happiness that nothing and no one can ever take away from you.

E ver since I can remember, I have been a seeker of this inner freedom. Ive been on a conscious and committed journey trying to discover the truths about life that would help me make sense of my existence and get the most out of my time here on earth. At the age of eighteen, I found my first spiritual guide and since then, Ive had the privilege of studying with many great and revered teachers and immersing myself in the knowledge and practices of the worlds most ancient spiritual traditions.

Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know contains the most important lessons about life that I have learned during my own profoundly transformative emotional and spiritual odyssey of the last thirty years. And even though the information in this book has been growing patiently and persistently inside of me for all this time, I couldnt have written it ten years ago, five years ago, even two years ago. Like a soup that you know still needs to simmer just a little bit more, this book needed these last twenty-four months of my life to add the final flavor. Now its ready, and it is my privilege and great joy to be able to offer it to you.

All of us spend our lives searching, consciously or unconsciously, for lasting fulfillment. We make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to what CD to listen to in the car to how hard to work on a project to whom we fall in love with, based on what we think will make us happier, what will create a greater sense of security, what will provide us with more of the things we tell ourselves we need to feel successful and complete. Most of these decisions are an attempt to master, or at least cope with, the outer world. This is where we put our energiestrying to get what we want and keep everything under control.

In spite of our best efforts, in spite of how hard we try to get everything to turn out the way we want it to, a strange things happens: our hopes and dreams keep bumping into reality. We have a picture of how we always thought our lives should be, but if we are really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that our lives look very different from that picture. And so we suffer, because what is happening is different from what we think should be happening, because we are feeling something different from what we think we should be feeling. Reality lets us down, not just once, but over and over again.

At some point in our lives, usually by the time we reach our thirties or forties, we face the difficult realization that no matter what we acquire or achieve, we cant completely control what happens on the outside. This conclusion often fills our hearts with a deep sensation of emotional and spiritual uneasiness, and haunts our minds with challenging and perhaps disturbing questions: What is the purpose of my life? What am I supposed to be doing here? Why is it so difficult for me to experience true happiness, true inner peace?

Have you ever seen one of those circus acts where someone has ten or twelve china plates spinning on top of thin sticks? The performer comes out and starts a few plates spinning and then adds a few more and a few more, until, hopefully, all his plates are spinning at once. At least, thats the idea. We all know what happensjust when he has the plates at one end of the table spinning right, a plate at the other end starts to wobble, so he runs down and gets it going faster. Suddenly, two plates in the middle look like they are about to topple off, and as soon as he sets them right, two others in separate spots are on the verge of crashing down. Back and forth he frantically races, the audience laughing with delight and cheering him on if he gets all of his plates to spin properly without disaster.

Why do we find this feat so fascinating? Why do we shriek with a kind of perverse delight when a plate drops? Because this display mirrors our own lives perfectly. The truth is, most of us live just like this. We have all these platesour relationship plate, our work plate, our family plate, our money plate, our health plate, and so many othersand our goal is to keep them all spinning at once. You know what you did first this morning when you woke up? You mentally checked your plates!! O.K., the relationship plate well, things with my husband are pretty good. How about the kids plate? Hmm a little shaky. Jennifer is having trouble in school but its not that bad yet. Let me look at this work plate. OH NO! Its wobbling pretty badlyI am really behind on that project at the office, and look down there at the money plate Oh gosh, our credit card bills are way too high this month, that plates about to crash

And so you spend the rest of the day running around trying to get the shaky plates stabilized, and hoping that too many plates dont start to fall at once. Your idea of a good day is when all of your plates are spinning, no mishaps. And a bad day? Well, we all know what thats like: it seems like some devious, invisible hand is knocking one plate after another off the sticks, and no matter how hard you try, you just cant keep them up in the air where they belong.