(This article first appeared in the Positive Health magazine in December 2002.)

I often thought that an unpleasant or difficult life situation would be made a lot easier to bear if someone could tell you reliably that this problem would be resolved by a certain date. Imagine your business going through a rough patch financially, but you knew for sure that it would all come right in twelve months’ time. Or wouldn’t it be reassuring to know that if only you kept going with your sensible eating plan and kept taking your supplements, you would definitely have a great deal more energy in eight weeks’ time? Or that you are guaranteed to meat Mister or Miss Right in two years’ time?

The thing is, we don’t know, and this is why it can be hard to hang on in there if we have to see ourselves through difficult times. No wonder many people go to clairvoyants, hoping to get that certainty that it will all end well. I have done it myself a few times in the past when I wanted to be reassured that there was an end to a stressful situation. Once, when I had just put my house on the market, I consulted a clairvoyant who assured me the house would be sold, but not before the summer – a good six months on. I found that very helpful when four of my prospective buyers, one after the other, dropped out of buying my house. Having been told that the situation would be resolved, I just got on with my life. The house was sold in August.

What puzzled me for a long time though was the following question: if the future can be predicted, is there any point in us striving for goals? If it is all out there, ready to happen, wouldn’t it be easier not to bother and just take what comes? Do we really have any part in shaping our destiny or is the die cast even before we are born? As the saying goes: if you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans. So is there any point in making an effort to improve ourselves, our lives or our health? I personally have always planned for new aims, worked towards them and eventually achieved most of them, often against all odds. So was it all in the stars anyway and I needn’t have bothered to put in all that effort?

After thinking about it for a long time and discussing it with friends and colleagues, I have come to the conclusion that it is actually the other way around. It is not that a clairvoyant is telling you what destiny is holding in store for you. She is teling you what you have created for yourself so far.

There was a report in a Sunday paper recently that a healer helped a girl walk again after she was wheelchair-bound for years. What he did was to make sure she changed her thought pattern about her condition. The doctors had give up on Lara, and Lara had given up on herself. Having been diagnosed as incurable, Lara could only think about things that depleted her energy. What the healer did was instill a new sense of purpose in her that made her focus on the energies she did possess and how to improve and harness them. He taught her not only to stand up in a physical sense, but also to stand up for herself with friends who were demanding too much of her time. Lara began to make progress. With the help of the healer, she had set the wheels in motion to get better. She was able to stand up and walk again.

This may be an extreme example, but it is not an isolated one. People can achieve incredible feats when they are focused on a goal. There is plenty of scientific evidence to show that this is all quite real. Lynne McTaggart has written a fascinating book called The Field in which she recounts the story of a group of frontier scientists who spent decades researching into the effects our thoughts and intentions have on our environment, with amazing results. In the early 1970s, in the grip of the oil crisis, a handful of scientists, in the course of trying to find an alternative to petrol as vehicle fuel, accidentally stumbled on an element of quantum physics that seemingly had enormous potential. The Zero Point Field, a field of unimaginably large quantum energy in the space between things – an ocean of microscopic vibrations – seemed to hold the answer to many big questions. Here, in so-called ‘dead’ space, lay the very key to life itself: to cell communication, to DNA, to strange effects like ESP (extrasensory perception) or spiritual healing, and even to that most elusive notion, the collective unconsciousness. Our thoughts and intentions cause vibrations in the energy field around us, which will then attract what we think about. The psychic picks up what vibrations we have sent out and what we will continue to attact if we continue thinking the way we do.

So next time you are in a difficult situation, be aware that you have the power to change it. If you don’t like what is happening, be aware that by changing your thoughts and attitudes, you can create a brighter future.

Vera Peiffer BA (Psych) FAPHP MNRPC