Find Your Inner Gold: 21 Powerful Tools to Bring Back Your Shine

By Karen Hood-Caddy

Find Your Inner Gold is a go-to tool kit that will help you change your thoughts and emotions quickly and fully so you can shine brightly. All the tools are ones you can use yourself to reset your energy and bring out the gold you have inside. You can use the tools over and over again. In fact, Karen Hood-Caddy recommends you do just that.

Drawn from a wide variety of teachings, psychological, energy medicine, and neuroscience, these tools will show you how to transform yourself and transform your life all by yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781982231859

Karen Hood-Caddy

Karen Hood-Caddy is an avid nature lover and the author of seven novels. Her first novel in The Wild Place Adventure Series, Howl, was nominated for the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award. She lives on Georgian Bay in Ontario.

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Copyright © 2019 Karen Hood-Caddy.

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.

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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 information, ideas, and suggestions in this book are not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. Before following any suggestions contained in this book, you should consult your personal physician. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising as a consequence of your use or application of any information or suggestions in this book.

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

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-3184-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-3186-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-3185-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019910232

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/19/2019

CONTENTS

Introduction

Tool #1 Breathing

Tool #2 Sentence Completions

Tool #3 Speaking Your Truth

Tool #4 The Power of Intention

Tool #5 Creating Amazing States of Being

Tool #6 Being Congruent

Tool #7 Honouring Your Parts

Tool #8 Energy Kinesiology

Tool #9 Havening

Tool #10 The Instant Replay

Tool #11 Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)

Tool #12 Questions as Grenades

Tool #13 Self-Hypnosis

Tool #14 Facing Problems and Pain

Tool #15 Being Amazing With Money

Tool #16 Visualization

Tool #17 Meditation

Tool #18 Your Future Self

Tool #19 Your Past Self

Tool #20 Inner Attunement

Tool #21 Opening Your Heart

Final Thoughts

Acknowledgments

About the Author

For Helen, Christine and T, my writerly soul sisters—

The Soul’s task is only this: to shine brightly.

INTRODUCTION

Many years ago, in Thailand, there was a nine-foot, clay statue of Buddha. It weighed over five tonnes and wasn’t particularly attractive, but it had survived for hundreds of years, withstanding wars, hurricanes, and all kinds of natural disasters. It was a local landmark.

One year, cracks began to appear on the surface of the statue. Wanting to assess how extensive a repair might be, a curious monk peered closely into the fissures with a flashlight. As he was doing his examination, he noticed something bright underneath the clay. It was yellow and shiny. Could it actually be gold? As he chipped away at the encrusted covering, he realized that it was! The entire statue was made of gold. Solid gold. The statue, now called the Golden Buddha, has become world-famous, and is renowned as one of the most beautiful images of Buddha on the planet. It draws thousands of visitors every year.

Why had the gold been covered over? Although no one knows for sure, it’s believed that the golden statue had been covered with muddy clay and other materials to protect and preserve it and perhaps, most importantly, to keep its value from being known. So, it would be safe.

Don’t most of us cover up what shines inside us in the same way? To be safe?

When we’re born, we are unique and pure and radiate our own golden perfection. But as we move through life, we get splattered and muddied and before we know it, we start feeling dull and ordinary.

Although we might be sad about losing what’s bright about us, we all have experienced the safety of not shining. The safety of not standing out. The security of not being too noticeable.

If we hide our light for long enough, or continually tune our brightness down, we start to lose touch with our brilliance. We might even start denying that there is anything bright and beautiful about us at all and say things like, There’s nothing special about me. What was I thinking?

The premise of this book is that each of us, in our own ways, are amazing. That doesn’t make us better than others. It simply acknowledges that at our core, each of us is made of gold.

I know this is contrary to what most religions say. As a child I remember sitting stiffly through a Sunday sermon when I was about ten, listening to the minister tell the congregation that we were all miserable sinners. I remember scouring my mind looking for things I’d done wrong, but I sensed the badness the minister was talking about didn’t come from a misdemeanor, but arose from some quintessential fault in my very being. In other words, I hadn’t done something bad, I WAS bad. It was hard to accept.

Years later, when I started to meditate and was exploring other religions, I learned that in Buddhism, people are considered to be basically good. It was a relief to hear that. It got me thinking that maybe we aren’t born sinners at all, but are simply saints who, like the golden Buddha, just got muddied up over the years. Saints that simply needed a power wash. That’s the intention of this book: to be a power wash.

For decades now, I’ve worked as a personal development coach. The way I see it, my job is to help people rediscover the gold inside themselves. In order to do this, I provide them with the power tools to clear away all the detritus that’s covering up the gold so they can shine fully once again. Now I want to give those tools to you.

Unfortunately, it’s always easier for us to see our flaws. Although it’s common for us to listen to ourselves and our friends talk about our imperfections, how often do we hear others talk about what’s great about us? If a friend started talking about their wonderful attributes, most of us would be uncomfortable listening. Why? Because praising ourselves or commenting on our own amazingness is taboo in our culture and many of us would judge the people who tout their assets as being arrogant or being full of themselves.

I’m not advocating that we all spout diatribes of self-admiration. But we have become a culture of people who have lost our excitement about ourselves and I want to change that.

Finding What’s Extraordinary

Just like Michelangelo, we must begin by trusting that what appears to look like a nondescript block of stone has a divine being inside it trying to get out. As Michelangelo said, I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

This book will give you the carving tools to shave away all that you are not until you reach what shines again.

Although our parents may have done a great job helping us navigate the world and develop our personalities, they may not have known how to help us become our fullest soulful selves. Many parents are highly invested in helping their children fit into the current culture. As a result, by the time we reach adulthood, we may be aware of how to live in the world, but we still might not have any idea of our own truth and what makes us glow. Our job is to find what makes us glow.

A Cautionary Note

Just so you know what to expect, as you begin to rediscover your own inner gold and start to shine, you may find yourself feeling more self-conscious and vulnerable. Others may notice you more, as if you’re walking around wearing jewels. You may even feel like a fraud or an imposter for a while, but that’s all right. It’s part of the process. Even though you might feel a little overwhelmed by the attention and be tempted to dim yourself down again, resist that temptation and trust the truth and power of the gold inside you. You will begin to understand that your greatest gift is merely this: to shine. You will become a lighthouse, showing the way forward. Martha Beck, in her wonderful book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, calls this being a Wayfarer. Someone who shows others the way home.

THE TOOLS

There are thousands of self-development tools, and more of them are being developed. This is happening because people want to change, and they want to be in charge of making that change. Most people don’t have the time or the money to go into a few years of psychoanalysis to figure themselves out. The validity of talk therapies is being challenged and people are less interested in having to go to therapists for answers. They want tools they can use to modulate themselves and tweak their own energy fields. This is the ultimate form of self-empowerment.

The tools in this book will allow you to make significant changes in yourself. Some of them will work better for you than others. We are all at different stages of development, so what is going to fit one person perfectly, may not fit another. You may find that some tools work with one type of issue and yet not work for another. Experiment. Use the ones that work and discard the ones that aren’t a good fit for you.

All the tools I’ve listed in this book are ones I