Mood, Food and Gratitude: Healing from the Way We Think

By Bo L. Arnold

What if you discovered that just behind your thoughts is the real you - a powerful, unlimited being capable of creating an easier, healthier, and more peaceful life?
The time has come for us to discover that the way we have been taught to think is completely out of alignment with who we truly are and is responsible for our unhappiness and preventable illnesses. Mood, Food, and Gratitude holds the keys to remembering that powerful truth. It challenges us to awaken to our authentic consciousness by illustrating the obvious contrast between what our thoughts tell us and what our hearts tell us. Therein lies the divergence between confusion and clarity, between sickness and vitality, between the alignment with the false and the alignment with our deep truth.
It is time for us to remember who we are the unending power of love itself.

Bos insightful and profound book holds important keys to discovering our wholeness.
- Katarina Van Derham,
Model, Actress, and Entrepreneur
Mood, Food and Gratitude will show you the real you...someone who is exceptional beyond your wildest dreams.
- Candace Kita,
Model and Managing Editor,
VIVA GLAM MAGAZINE
Breaking down misperceptions of thought, Bo L. Arnold shows us what our thoughts do to us and how we can take back the control. It is a truly inspiring read.
- VIVA GLAM MAGAZINE

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504357654

Bo L. Arnold

BO L. ARNOLD is a writer for Viva Glam Magazine, an entrepreneur, and a seasoned speaker. She has dedicated her life to helping others embrace personal empowerment, high-quality nutrition, and healthy living for more than 25 years. Bo shares her time between Columbus, Ohio and Scotland, UK.

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Copyright © 2016 Bo L. Arnold.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5764-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5766-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5765-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016907676

Balboa Press rev. date: 02/10/2017

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I Mood

Essay 1 Love vs. Non-Love

Essay 2 The Hole vs. the Whole

Essay 3 The Misperception of Reality

Essay 4 Normal vs. Common

Essay 5 Habits and Patterns

Essay 6 We Push Our Own Buttons

Essay 7 From Compliments to Collaboration

Part II Food

Essay 8 Energetic Connections

Essay 9 Frequency Living

Essay 10 Stress

Essay 11 Thinking and Eating

Essay 12 Inner Intelligence

Essay 13 Mind-Body Alignment

Part III Gratitude

Essay 14 The Gift of Gratitude

Essay 15 The Peace in Thinking Less

Essay 16 The Power of Quiet Moments

Essay 17 The Healing Power of Nature

Essay 18 The Power of Smiling

Essay 19 The Power of Connection

Essay 20 The Infinite Power of Love

Notes

I wrote this book

for you …

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Part I

1.   Boulders in Your Cart

2.   Born Good Enough, Free, Adequate, and Without Labels

3.   Teaching Us We are Not Good Enough

4.   Where Does it End?/My Turn to Say Something Mean

Part II

5.   The Past, Present, and Future

Part II

6.   Who We Think We Are vs. Who We Really Are

LIST OF FIGURES

Part I

1.   Non-Love/Fear vs. Love

2.   Compromise vs. Collaboration

Part II

3.   High Frequency/Promotes Health – Low Frequency/Weakens Health

4.   Non-Alignment vs. Alignment

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to personally thank the following people and organizations for their contributions to my inspiration, experience, knowledge, and other loving assistance in creating this book:

First and foremost, I would like to thank my editor and confidante, Heather Doyle Fraser, for her expertise and support. You understood the depth of the material and my dedication to telling the bold truth. Deep down, there are no words. I’d also like to give special thanks to Hilda Doyle, my amazing illustrator and the one who reminded me that Heather is an editor.

If it weren’t for Katarina Van Derham, my dear friend and Founder/CEO of Viva Glam Magazine, I wouldn’t have the vast readership that comes with a weekly column, Great Mind. Thank you, Katarina, for putting together a most exceptional magazine, for your unending support, and for the freedom to write about energy, love, and truth. You’re family to me. I love you dearly. xoxo

Great job to my copy editor and close friend, Dawn Allen. Thank you, my sista! I appreciate all of the help and support you have given throughout the years.

I’d like to thank my family and best pals—Jane, Pookie and Buster (my four-legged kids - RIP), Mom, Kel, Kev, Terri, Casey, Lindsey, Bri, Jason, Chirila (RIP), Sarah, Riggs (Dude), Nancy, Rosie, Aunt Maggie, Sophia, Caroline, and my neighborhood family for understanding that I couldn’t join you at most functions for the past six years, because I was writing this book. Thank you for your loyalty, support, and love!

Thank you, Lisa Noland, aka Ruby, for giving me the message from our special friends that it was time to write the book I came here to write. You’re super special. Love you, Cosmos.

Thank you to Michele Davis and the magical, healing horses of Serendipity Stables in York Center, Ohio, for all the support, brutal honesty, and love.

Thank you Grams (RIP) and Aunt Marian (RIP), for being so supportive, inspirational, and loving in my life. Grams, you’re the best ever. Aunt Marian, as a pioneer of women in journalism, you taught me so much about the world. I love you both.

I’d like to express my deep gratitude to Nancy Levin for challenging me to be a better writer. You are a remarkable author and teacher of writing. Your light shines so very brightly.

Thank you, Bal Capote, for helping me grow in so many ways. You’re a true friend.

I would like to thank my publisher, Balboa Press, for helping make my dream come true. Thank you for your expertise and assistance every step of the way. A special thank you to Andrew Carter, Heather Carter, Karole Canada, and Denver Asuncion. You’re amazing!

To JHS, the other half of my soul, I thank you for the brutal honesty and life experiences that provided material for the book, hours of interesting conversation and, most of all, an opportunity for me to remember who I truly am. You are the love of all of my lifetimes.

INTRODUCTION

What I Remembered

One Christmas Eve, someone I had been dating for more than five years called, not to say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, but to tell me it was over. I was devastated. To say I never saw it coming wouldn’t be the truth. I did. But to say my mind ignored what my heart had known for some time would be.

For most of my life, the end of a relationship felt like the end of my life. I depended on the love of another person to make me feel valuable and whole, because inside my head were these niggling thoughts that I wasn’t good enough—that I wasn’t lovable. This dependency made me blind to the truth about my relationships and my motivation for being in them. That blindness made me stay in relationships when I needed to leave, often to my detriment. And that wasn’t the only detrimental effect my niggling thoughts were having on my life. Thinking I wasn’t good enough and that I was unworthy of love has held me back in many ways throughout the years. I often took things other people said personally and let their thoughts negatively affect me. There have been a lot of things I didn’t experience because my thoughts told me I wasn’t capable. My life was full of ups and downs, making me feel helpless and hopeless at times. But all of that was about to change.

During an afternoon of tears and despair over the breakup, I experienced something marvelous. Right in the middle of sobbing, sniffling, and feeling sorry for myself, I stopped crying. No whimpering, no deep breaths. Just silence. Then, I heard a voice within me say, Wait a minute. This can’t be right—all this crying, misery, doom, and gloom. There has to be something else. I noticed I was sitting upright now instead of slumped over the ottoman. My dogs were staring at me. The voice continued: The truth is, I am not special because someone else thinks I am—I am special all by myself. And I don’t need someone else to love me—I need to love myself. Who was saying all of this? The voice wasn’t coming from my mind. These weren’t my thoughts. No. This voice was coming from a deeper, more authentic place. It was coming from my soul, my heart center. I knew these words were the truth. I knew it with all my heart. My life has never been the same.

Since that day, I have been on a quest to uncover the whole truth about who I really am. It’s not a quest I have orchestrated, though. It is a quest that has unfolded with divine guidance at the helm. I am a big part of that divine guidance. As more is revealed to me in ways I could never have imagined, through experiences I could never have devised in my mind, I can see what has happened to me that made me long for love and why I thought that love existed outside of myself. I want to share this information with you.

What’s in This Book?

To communicate to you what I have experienced, I have arranged this book into three main parts—Mood, Food, and Gratitude. Each part has several essays that can be read as stand-alone articles or as part of the whole. Each essay builds on the next, as does each main part. Whatever method you choose to read the book is just the way you are meant to read it.

In part I, Mood, I uncover the main motivators in life. The first essay sets up the system of contrasts that I use throughout the book to illustrate how each of these motivators shape our life experiences. The disparities between what our thoughts tell us and what our hearts tell us will become clear and easy to recognize simply through contrast. Through the remaining essays in part I, you will see how contrast also assists us in breaking down the misperceptions and damaging thoughts we have been programmed to believe about ourselves and others. This ultimately leads us to remember what is true versus what is untrue. Along the way, contrast is used to illuminate the origin of our thoughts, which will assist us in correcting our training, allowing us to take our lives and our power back from our thoughts—thoughts that have made us believe we are less than we are, that have made us feel like victims, and that have had adverse effects on our health.

In part II, we move to Food—the food of life, which is everything that feeds our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls. Here we get a chance to see the building blocks of the universe, which are no different from our own building blocks. This is where we dip into the quantum realm of energy and the truth about how it looks, feels, and sounds to us. This perspective is important in understanding who we really are and why we feel sadness or joy, stress or peace, sickness or health. We will answer the questions, Why are we feeding ourselves chemicals and nutritionally deficient food?, Why do we ignore what our bodies are telling us? and Why are we often disconnected from reality? The energetic connection to our life experiences and the thoughts we have are keys to remembering our truths. With remembering comes understanding. With understanding comes healing.

Healing leads us to part III—Gratitude. In this part, I remind you of the amazing gifts and super powers that are within you. I cannot teach you what you already know in your heart to be true. However, many of us are often so caught up in our thoughts that we have forgotten how cleansing it is to spend time with nature or how powerful a peaceful moment can be. Part III is motivated only by love and the high frequency aspects of love—kindness, compassion, and connection. There is so much assistance available to guide us back to our authentic truth that it can be found virtually everywhere. All we have to do is tune into it.

Truth and Encouragement

From the moment we are born, we are taught to think in ways that are inconsistent with the ways of our hearts and the ways of love. We have been trained to think we are someone we are not. We are trained to believe, think, and act in ways that are separating, destructive, stressful, and unhealthy. The way we are taught to think is directly responsible for most of our arguments, judgments, feelings of guilt, resentments, and even our illnesses. It is time for us to see the truth and to do that I am inviting you to become aware of the contrast between a life lived in your mind, on its terms, with the programmed beliefs and thoughts you have about yourself and the world versus the simple, free, healthy, peaceful life you can live, on your terms, through the love in your heart.

To paraphrase Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, physicist and author, in the cutting-edge film about our quantum world, What the Bleep Do We Know? (Medula Films, 2004), What I used to think was real is now unreal to me, and what I used to think was unreal is now real to me. This sums up my sentiments exactly. My understanding of myself and the world has completely shifted and been transformed. Looking back now, it seems to me that the way I lived my life—my beliefs, thoughts, and reactions to people and events—was completely backwards. Today, through the divine process of remembering who I am, I feel more balanced and aligned with love than ever before. I now know I am not my thoughts. Perhaps you will come to the same conclusion.

Some of the things I have expressed in this book may astonish you, make you laugh, make you cry, make you angry, turn you off, empower, or threaten you, because they are vastly different from what we have been taught. They may shake the very world you thought you knew off its foundation. To see the truth of the origin of our beliefs, thoughts, and actions can be hard to take. But this is exactly what the truth does—it rocks your world.

It’s possible that when you realize the real you exists beyond your training—beyond your beliefs and thoughts about yourself—your mind might resist the truth. Your thoughts may dig in and stand their ground as unhealthy, destructive beliefs are brought to the surface and challenged. That’s okay. Everything you have been taught is about to be challenged. And resistance is as valuable a guide to see the truth as love is. Remember that just because we have been trained to believe something doesn’t mean it’s the truth, and just because we have always done it this way doesn’t means it needs to continue. Perhaps what we have been taught to think is there for the sole/soul purpose of seeing it so we can change it.

This book is nothing more or less than you need it to be—a light on your path, a kind word to encourage you, or validation for what you already know or have experienced as truth. You will know the truth in your heart and soul. Your experiences may be different from mine, not more or less valuable or powerful. No comparisons can be made between how your quest for your truth unfolds and how mine unfolds. Make changes in your life as you see fit, or make none. There is no specific rulebook or step-by-step program to follow. There are no expectations or conditions. Everything is as it is, and everything is divine.

You are not alone. I am with you as you read every word and turn every page because we are always connected through the love in our hearts. We are the love we seek. It is time to begin remembering our truth. We deserve it.

PART I

MOOD

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ESSAY 1

Love vs. Non-Love

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The only force in the universe powerful enough to overcome fear is love.

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Love

I wanted the world to be easy, fun, exciting, romantic, and loving. I wanted to be as good as other people or better—the best, even. I wanted to be worthy of love. I wanted to look good and feel good. I wanted to be capable, successful, and happy—the goals set by society and my parents. I wanted to look like I had my life together, as if I knew what I was doing and was doing it well. I wanted my life to feel complete in every way. But no matter what I did, no matter who I was intimately involved with, what friends I had, what job I had, or what stuff I bought, I could never get there—at least not with the way I thought about the world and definitely not with the way I thought about myself. Something had to change. Then one day it did. I learned the truth.

The truth is, there are only two motivating forces in life: love and fear. These emotions incite behaviors that provide us with two diametrically opposed and conflicting life experiences. In one realm exists love in all its glory, with peace, healing, and connective energy. Love is balance. In the other realm exists fear, or non-love. Created as an irrational program in the mind that we blindly follow, non-love is completely disconnected from the heart and is full of fear, misperception, illness, and loneliness. We have been taught this irrational program and have grown up believing that the program is who we are. This is not true at all. We are not our beliefs or thoughts. We are not anything that is derived from the mind.

Everything that is expressed in a non-loving way is out of balance with everything that is authentic and loving within us. When we think and act in non-loving ways, we are clearly out of balance. So the derogatory words about a family member or co-worker are out of balance, as is consistently eating foods that are unsupportive of good health. These aren’t things to feel bad about. That would just be more imbalance. These are merely things to recognize and correct. That’s all.

Non-love, or fear, is not to be confused with our built-in primitive fear response called fight, flight, or freeze, which is a natural survival instinct. Mind-created fear is not natural and certainly does not help with our survival in any way. In fact, mind-created fear is responsible for the destruction of our relationships and most of our health issues. It is the reason for arguments, hatred, the killing of the planet, corporate and banking greed, and out-of-control governments. We can see the destruction wrought by mind-created fear in ourselves and in those around us, as well as on the world stage. It all originates from the same place—non-love.

Of the two, love is our natural state. Love is normal. Love is easy. There is no thinking involved with love. For instance, when you look at your children or your dog, you just know the love is there. You don’t have to give it any consideration or analysis. Opinion polls among your friends aren’t necessary, and you won’t stay awake at night contemplating whether you really love your children or your dog. Another example could be when you look at your partner and feel a deep love connection, as if you have always known each other. You didn’t think this up. You didn’t decide to believe in this love because someone told you about it and it seemed like a good idea. You didn’t force it or manipulate it into being. It just happened, as true love does. In our natural state of being, we love others purely, without distraction, restriction, questions, or attachment, because love isn’t comprised of conditions and rules. It is not meant to pacify anything within us, solve our problems, or make us feel better about ourselves. Love just is. It is effortless, spontaneous, and genuine. Love is simple.

Love provides us with unmatched clarity to see the deeper dimension within people, rather than just looking at what’s on the surface. With love, we know that what’s on the surface doesn’t define us. With love, we see beyond the anger, hatred, lack of compassion, confusion, and frustration that many of us exhibit when we are in a place of non-love. Instead, we focus on the love that exists beneath all of that. We know that color, religion, race, beliefs, job titles, money, and material possessions create worthless divisions that have no relevance where love exists.

With love, we trust that all is well. In this pure state of being, we are often unaware of the specific universal purpose behind our connections and experiences. But we don’t mind, because we automatically know that everything works for our benefit, even if we