Magic usually comes alive in Disney movies or in the hands of a famous magician. We often tend to think that magic only happens in our fantasy and in our dreams, but you might think twice about that.
Speaking about dreams, it’s actually my belief that magic starts exactly there – By having a dream! You can’t see it, feel it or touch it yet, but in your mind’s eye, your vision becomes so real and so clear, that this dream becomes your new reality. I therefore tend to think that magic is purely a shift in perception. And if that is true, it opens many doors to new and exciting possibilities.
It was on April 10th of this year, when I first met with Josep Soler. Josep is an international lecturer, NLP teacher, healer and neuroscience researcher from Barcelona, Spain. I clearly remember that after talking with him for about half an hour, he told me: “Dirk, you are one of the first persons here in North America who truly understands the essence of my work.” It was indeed beautiful to hear that so much of the work that I do, is directly linked to what Josep has been doing for over the last two decades.
Creating Magic
After having participated in two of his workshops in Kelowna, it was clear to me that we could create even more magic when combining our experience and passion. Before we knew, we were dreaming up this beautiful and transformational retreat in Costa Rica. I saw us literally all sitting together in a large gazebo by the Pacific Ocean. I could hear the waves crashing on the beach while we were doing the work with the participants. I could feel people’s emotions change and watch them step into a new reality and transform. It was beautiful!
Within three weeks, the program was ready and we started sharing and promoting it. By early November, the retreat was full. We had both male and female participants from Canada, Central and South America, ranging in ages between 27 and 75 years. Every single person with their very own unique reason to be there. Here are some of the areas that Josep and I covered during this 5-day retreat:
* Develop a deep connection with our intuition * Learn skills to influence the autonomic nervous system * Learn to better understand the science of synchronicities and how to create a new reality * Become a master in recognizing long running patterns and how to change them * Learn the art of visualization and how to sculpt and transform specific symptoms in the body * Learn about the science and intelligence of the heart by measuring heart-rate variability and coherence * Create an overall mind-heart-body connection
Energy Centres
According to ancient teachings and to modern science, we have seven energy centres in and around our body. Just see them as electromagnetic fields, but they are actually more like biological fields which include very many types of spectral energy. In addition to that, there is a specificity about the energetic functions which cannot be defined electro-magnetically or in any other way. In other words, there are energies that cannot be defined according to the known laws of physics today.
“Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.” – Albert Einstein
The three lower energy centres are mainly related to our emotions, and the upper three are being used when creating intentions, when we visualize and start dreaming.
When Josep and I started dreaming and setting intentions for the retreat, we activated the upper three energy centres (we taught people how to do that during the retreat).
The information in these three areas becomes then highly orderly (also called: coherent). We then started experiencing strong emotions related to our intentions. We could literally feel, see and smell everything that was happening during that week. We now activated the three lower energy centres in our body. And the cool thing about this is, that our body cannot distinguish the difference between something that we vividly imagine and deeply feel, and something that is actually happening.
This is also one of the main reasons why so many of us can experience suffering for extended periods of time. It’s the same process but now in the opposite direction.
The moment you begin to master this process, something magical starts happening – The energy centre between the three upper and lower centres, which is the area of the heart, becomes very active and coherent, and a strong feeling is being experienced. The human heart emits the strongest electromagnetic field in our body. The quality of this feeling is so powerful that it will literally attract actual events that exactly match the feeling you just experienced. The answer to this process can be found by applying the laws of quantum physics.
“An integrative experience that I will forever be grateful for. Five days of lessons by Dirk and Josep all presented against the backdrop of blue skies, churning waves and the Eden-like greenery of Costa Rica. The Sugar Beach Hotel staff are genuinely attentive and caring. The meals are fresh and plated plentifully. It was enriching to meet other people from distant South American lands at the retreat and to remember that we are all children of God. Thank you Dirk and Josep.” Norma Wellwood, Vancouver, B.C. Canada
Magic for You
Since I was mentioning magic (purely a shift in perception), how open are you to create magic in your own life? How open are you to let go of old beliefs, and start creating a new reality based on the latest scientific findings?
You know what the hardest part of this new process is? To admit to yourself that things might be different than you have always believed. We have the tendency to defend our own beliefs, even if they are handed to us by our parents or teachers, maybe 40 years ago. Mark Twain used to say it beautifully: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.”
Josep and I have decided to organize more retreats in 2018. We already started blocking rooms in Costa Rica for December 5 – 10, 2018. But we we also organize shorter versions of this retreat in Canada. Mainly weekend retreats. And you are more than welcome. We would love to have you there. So, stay tuned for further announcements by email and on my events web page: chooseheart.com.
Since I was a child, I have always loved creating new experiences. And I still do. It’s an expression of my curiosity and it brings out the aliveness in me, something that we’re all born with and long for, in one way or the other.
When I was about 5 years old, I was suffering from severe bronchitis and I spent quite a bit of time in bed. But I remember, even then I found ways to get in touch with my aliveness. My parents weren’t always too impressed with this though.
One day, I lifted a small table on top of my mattress. On top of the small table I balanced a chair and managed to climb it with one hand, and crayons in the other, and I started colouring on the ceiling. I figured that it would be fun to look at my ‘art’ while lying in bed.
Through the years, I’ve become a bit more skilled in creating my experiences. They have certainly evolved into more meaningful ones. Especially over the last few years – I now apply my skills and intuition to create healing experiences for those who are physically, emotionally and mentally not in balance. And most recently, my work with the veterans who suffer from PTSD symptoms, enable me to further learn, grow and experiment. I’ve found that creating new experiences based on loving care and connection, helps them heal the most.
Magic becomes the new normal
When we can’t see something, while we know it exists, or when something happens and we cannot explain it based on the information that we have (learned or experienced in our past), we tend to label it as Magic. It’s the easiest solution for not getting too confused. That’s why for example spontaneous healing, energy healing, remote viewing and creating your future based on setting intentions receive so little credibility – It just goes beyond our imagination and what we think is possible. Albert Einstein used to explain this concept in a beautiful way. He said:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
We completely forget that everything that has ever been created, always started with imagination. Whether it was the first wheel, electricity, the first space journey or the internet.
Retreat about creating
Maybe you have heard about alternative healing, but you don’t know how to apply it. Maybe you believe in your unlimited potential but you don’t know how to put it to good use. Maybe you feel like there’s something blocking you deep within yourself that keeps you from creating the life you desire. Or maybe you’re just curious about how the new science is explaining our health and growth in unseen ways.
Together with Spanish author, lecturer and neuroscience researcher Josep Soler, I organize a highly powerful and transformative retreat in beautiful Costa Rica from November 27 – December 2, 2017.
During this retreat, both Josep and myself, will inspire you to break through all the mental constructs and internal barriers that keep you living a limited life – the life you are in right now.
We will help you reach your full potential and you will discover that nothing can go wrong in your life – when heart and mind are aligned, you’ll be able to understand the purpose of all events in your life. You will even be able to overcome diseases in your body.
Together we will apply science & spirituality to create lasting change and witness how magic becomes the new normal.
Recently, I was speaking with a friend of mine about bringing out the child in us. We joked and pretended that we were young children again. There were lots of “what if….” and “just pretend that…”, but then I was being confronted with a huge surprise. “Thank you so much Dirk”, she told me after a while. “For what?” I asked. “For reviving me, and bringing out the child in me again. I am in awe.”
The child in you is always alive
Although my friend somehow knew that this little child was not completely forgotten, she could have never envisioned that it could be coming alive so quickly though. It took her completely off guard and woke her up, from years and years of being in some kind of sleepy state. Not feeling fully alive. Not feeling playful and light. This seriousness and sense of responsibility had crept into her life over the years, without even realizing it. But by being playful, something was triggered inside her—her inner child woke up!
From personal experience, I know that many grownups prefer to ignore to listen to the child within them. Many of us often feel that it’s childish to think that way: “What can a child offer us?” But they forget that this child is who they really are. This child once was in awe when watching the first snow flakes coming down. This same child loved to play outside all day long. Wasn’t hungry when mum called for dinner and wasn’t tired during the 3-day school trip. We were fully alive!
So what has happened then?
We are expected to grow up. School suddenly becomes more serious, and high marks make our teachers and parents happy. We apply for admission to a respected university. Mostly, not because it’s our passion, but because our parents think this is the best choice to secure a good future career. Do I need to go on? You get it, right?
I will share a secret with you that I kept completely to myself up to a year ago or so. When I was fourteen and in high school, I had to choose the subjects I wanted to focus on. I had no clue what I wanted to do after school, I was only fourteen. My dad was getting concerned and had me sign up for a career test. I was not motivated at the time, but went through almost a full day of psychological tests. The end-result was not very helpful to me – I could listen well and I was very creative, and some career options were being presented. I was not impressed. But about a month or so later, I found the official test results somewhere on my dad’s desk and started reading. I was in shock! They basically concluded that I wasn’t very smart and they found it hard to come up with a good advise for Dirk.
I had always been a happy kid and I was doing pretty well at school, but reading this report changed my life for the next twenty years. I started believing that I was stupid and school became a struggle. At some point, I felt so bad about it that I wanted to prove I wasn’t stupid. About twenty years later, I was working as a CEO for American Express. I had built an amazing career and was very successful in what I did. But I wasn’t happy… I just wanted to prove to myself and to my family that I wasn’t stupid. How sad.
When you become disconnected from your heart, you’re not living. But when you’re connected to your heart, you become like a child. You’re a spark of divine energy. I can tell you, that I am deeply connected to my heart now, and I am very grateful for this traumatic experience. It was my teacher! The medieval mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg said it beautifully: “A fish cannot drown in water, and a bird does not fall from the sky. Each creature must find its God given element.”
I was therefore touched by Paulo Coelho’s words in the movie The Power of The Heart – The child says: “Hello I am here.” But we are grown up now and not going to listen to this child, because this child has childish dreams, and so we forget the child. The moment we forget the child, we think that the child is going to forget us. But the child is not going to forget us. This child will always be here and says again: “Hello, I am here. I am talking to you. Can you listen?” You will then say: “Shut up, I don’t want to listen to you.”
But the day that you’re facing death, this child will be there again, and will ask you: “Why didn’t you listen to me?” You then have to answer. And your answer will be your hell, or your heaven.
3 simple ways to connect with the child in you
It would be easy for me to tell you just to do fun stuff. Things that you are really passionate about. Although that is definitely important, I believe there’s something more to this. Below are three simple ways of teaching yourself to connect with the child in you.
1. Becoming aware of now Science shows us that we are pure energy systems. We are for over 99% energy and the remaining 1% is matter. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? So if we are virtually pure energy, we need to make sure that we tap into this energy, if we want to connect to our deepest self, our soul, the child in you. There’s a law in science that says: “Where the attention goes, is where the energy flows.” So, in stead of always being focused on everything outside of you, which will cause you to disconnect you from yourself, start becoming aware of what you are doing in this very moment — feel what you feel right now, become aware of the flavours of the food you put into your mouth, truly enjoy the sounds of the instruments and voice when you listen to your favourite music and take in all the beautiful elements of nature when you go outside. And when thoughts do come up, just ignore them and ask yourself: “What is it that I feel right now?”
You’ll start noticing that the many thoughts that go through your head on a continuous basis, won’t be so intense anymore. You literally start creating space in between all of your thoughts, and it’s exactly in that void, between your thoughts, where your creativity (your inner child) can be accessed.
2. A picture of you One of my favourite things to do is to grab an old picture from when I was 4, 5 or 6 years old. Then, just sit down at a place where you won’t be disturbed, and just look at this picture. Can you still feel how you felt at that moment? Excited, silly, happy, curious? What did your days look like? What kind of fantasies and dreams did you have? What did you like the most? Whatever comes up, and without thinking or using any judgements, write this down on a piece of paper. Now just look at yourself, sitting in the chair, 20, 30 or 40-something years later. You’re still this same child. Your body might have changed, and you might have accumulated more experiences, but this little child, with exciting dreams and passions is still there.
3. Heart focused breathing This is the most powerful step – the heart focused breathing. The healing power of breath has been used over thousands of years already, but seems almost insignificant in our fast paced life with continuous, external stimuli. In this exercise, you will shift your attention (and therefore your energy) to your heart, energetically the most powerful organ in your body.
STEP 1: Focus your attention in the area of your heart. Feel your breath flowing in and out through your lungs, and just breathe a little slower than you normally would. STEP 2: With each breath, draw in the feelings from your childhood memories and feel them in your heart while breathing. STEP 3: Set a genuine intent to anchor these memories throughout your day, and use them while working on new ideas and projects.
Please let me know how much fun you had in trying the exercises, and how it changed your perception on your current life. I would love to hear from you. Feel free to follow me on Facebook or on Twitter.
It was in the middle of the night and I was wearing my pyjamas. Together with my two older brothers, I was sitting in the dark living room in front of a ‘state-of-the-art’ Philips black-and-white television. I was four years old but I still remember feeling such an incredible excitement from both of my brothers as we huddled together even more closely to the small screen. It was like a science fiction movie when we saw an astronaut descending the ladder of the Apollo 11 while a voice, full of excitement, came from the little speaker in the TV. The astronaut was of course Neil Armstrong and he was the first human in history to step onto the surface of the moon on July 21, 1969. We later heard him speak: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The world was ecstatic! Or?
Two weeks after this memorable night, I stayed with my grandma for the weekend. I loved these weekends because she lived in the countryside, close to the forest, it was always very quiet and our time together was special to me. Over dinner I started telling her all about my experience of witnessing the moon landing two weeks ago and how excited we all three were about seeing Neil Armstrong descending that ladder. Grandma suddenly stopped eating, slowly looked up at me and said: “That’s such a nonsense! Don’t believe everything you see on that television.” And that was basically the end of my exciting story and we moved on with our dinner, talking about the small things which had happened that day.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain
That night in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandmother’s reaction – how could she not believe this life changing discovery? I had seen it with my own eyes (and so had millions of other people around the world), and I intuitively felt that something big had just happened. Was it her steadfast believe in God that kept her from accepting this historic moon landing because humans were messing with God’s plan? Or was it just too crazy for her to be real? From my bed I could look through the window and caught a glimpse of the moon, high in the dark sky. I had to give her this – It was almost too crazy to imagine that a man had been walking on this beautiful moon I was just looking at… Even though I respected and loved my grandmother so much, this was something she couldn’t take away from me because I knew it was real.
Stuff that we believe
When you look at your own life, what is it that you believe? Are you more like my grandma, and will you feel uncomfortable when things might be different from what you think they are? Or are you comfortable to look at the origin of your beliefs, and are you open to new discoveries that can possibly compromise your current beliefs? There’s a good chance you never thought about it this way. Most of us don’t, but I like to share some modern science with you so that you better understand why I write this article in the first place.
The majority of the things that you believe in your life, are not your own. Yes, this might surprise you, but until you were six or seven years old you didn’t decide which beliefs were going to be yours. Your brains simply didn’t have that capacity — the cultural influence, the things your parents (or caregivers) and teachers at school told you, and all other experiences you were exposed to were simply absorbed by your subconscious mind, because that’s how we learn as a small child. The brain wave patterns in young children are relatively slow because the brain is not fully formed yet. By the time we are nine years old we begin to develop our critical and analytical mind and we start applying everything that is stored in our subconscious mind.
But now comes the big surprise (or maybe it’s a shocker for you) — This same subconscious mind controls 95% of how you experience and deal with your circumstances. So most of what you believe and think is “real”, was what you simply absorbed when you were a child. And these programs are still running your life today, maybe decades later, leading you to feel like a victim, being afraid to make mistakes, thinking that you’re not good enough and so on.
It is no surprise then, that at some point in your life you start wondering who you really are and what the purpose of life means to you (did I mention midlife crisis?). Or you wonder why you always react that same way to your mother, spouse or co-worker — the programs of your subconscious mind are running the show for 95% of your day and they are not even yours. Will these programs meet the needs of your deepest wishes and desires? Most likely not!
From Reacting to Creating
There are interesting and exciting ways to break your old patterns. When you become aware of how your mind, heart and nervous system work together, and how your beliefs and emotions shape you, you have allowed yourself to start learning to make lasting change, so that you can move from a reactive life, to start creating along the path of your soul. And this is exactly what I will be sharing with you in my upcoming events, workfunshops and retreats. It’s my passion to inspire you, empower you and share really effective tools with you.
It was on April 10th of this year, when I first met with Josep Soler. Josep is an international lecturer, NLP teacher, healer and neuroscience researcher from Barcelona, Spain. I clearly remember that after talking with him for about half an hour, he told me: “Dirk, you are one of the first persons here in North America who truly understands the essence of my work.” It was indeed beautiful to hear that so much of the work that I do, is directly linked to what Josep has been doing for over the last two decades.
I was therefore touched by Paulo Coelho’s words in the movie The Power of The Heart – The child says: “Hello I am here.” But we are grown up now and not going to listen to this child, because this child has childish dreams, and so we forget the child. The moment we forget the child, we think that the child is going to forget us. But the child is not going to forget us. This child will always be here and says again: “Hello, I am here. I am talking to you. Can you listen?” You will then say: “Shut up, I don’t want to listen to you.”
You’ll start noticing that the many thoughts that go through your head on a continuous basis, won’t be so intense anymore. You literally start creating space in between all of your thoughts, and it’s exactly in that void, between your thoughts, where your creativity (your inner child) can be accessed.
When you look at your own life, what is it that you believe? Are you more like my grandma, and will you feel uncomfortable when things might be different from what you think they are? Or are you comfortable to look at the origin of your beliefs, and are you open to new discoveries that can possibly compromise your current beliefs? There’s a good chance you never thought about it this way. Most of us don’t, but I like to share some modern science with you so that you better understand why I write this article in the first place.