“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Anaïs Nin
Nancy Levin is an author, speaker and coach/mentor who used to be an Events Organiser for Hay House until one day she decided she wanted to re-orient her life and fortunately had such a good relationship with her boss, she was able to be open and honest about the need for a change and given the time to prepare for doing so.
He advised her not to do anything rash straightaway, to go away and research what she wanted to do and then when she was ready and prepared for the transition, she could do so with less fear and with their support. Thus she went from being the organiser to being a coach herself, for people who could identify with where she had been, the kind of constraints she had confronted and were ready for her to inspire them to do the same.
That transition she made and the mentoring she received became the subject of her first book Jump…and your life will appear – an inch by inch guide to making a major change in your life.
I haven’t read this earlier book, I came across Nancy Levin via the intuitive coach I regularly listen to Colette Baron Reid whose book Uncharted, I read and reviewed in 2016. As a part of the lead up to reading Colette’s book, I listened to a lot of her ‘real and raw’ conversations she had with people whose work she admired, unscripted conversations talking about their perspectives on spirituality, the universe and the things that were helping them to navigate life, that they shared. All these conversations are really interesting and we find that some resonate more than others.
Nancy Levin’s conversation was particularly interesting because she had been in quite a traditional realm prior to making this jump, so I think she attracts quite a few followers who are not quite ready to jump, who are dependent on an unfulfilling job, their spouse, their family, their home, but who have that feeling that they not entirely fulfilled by what they are doing in their lives and would like some tools or resources to help them make the shift.
During the conversation, they explore how people often put their worth in the hands of others, that worth isn’t related to what we do or do not do, it’s about coming into the right relationship with ourselves first, the subject explored in her new book.
In Worthy, Boost Your Self-Worth to Grow Your Net Worth, she takes the jump a step further and analyses what might be behind the reluctance, or resistance as she likes to call it, to change. She tells the story behind the story of her own life, of how she rarely spent money on herself, but often on her husband because she was trying to make him happy. Through coaching, she was able to have greater awareness of her own patterns and see how she was getting in her own way of achieving what she wanted.
However, just having this knowledge isn’t enough to make a change, so in the new book, she takes the reader through a number of exercises to discover our own patterns, habits and inclinations and how they might be limiting our ability to move into that life that we would prefer to be living.
She refers to them as shadow beliefs, a term introduced by her mentor Debbie Ford, beliefs formed when we were so young, they hide outside our conscious awareness. They are nourished by thoughts and situations that confirm their existence, providing further resistance against any desire to change.
Having identified those beliefs (or excuses), she then invites us to prove them wrong, to find the counter belief and phrase it.
“Excuses are actually just well packaged resistance. But our resistance has a lot to do with our self-worth. When we feel worthy, we don’t resist what’s good for us. We feel we deserve what we want, so we find it much easier to step right over our fears and go for it. That’s the blessing of worthiness. If we don’t feel we deserve what we want, we let resistance keep us down.”
She dissects a number of the more common excuses and beliefs and uncovers the real reason for the resistance beneath it, using case studies of clients she has worked with and her own personal story.
The book moves further on, into defining what you want most and how to move from excuses to action, to taking back your power, taking responsibility, practising self-trust and self-respect.
A lot of the messages relate to financial empowerment and how this connects to other aspects of our lives and ability to make decisions. It ends with an exercise to create a list of 50 desires, five of which must be altruistic desires for other people, readying the reader for taking action, getting ready to do the impossible.
It’s a thought-provoking read that’s likely to be uncomfortable at times, digging into one’s own limiting beliefs, but rewarding by allowing us a way to explore the shadow side and then express the opposite, the things that you want to do, that you may not have ever taken seriously or even expressed and daring you to take action and allow those desires to manifest.
“What is now proved was once only imagined.” William Blake
To Buy a Copy of Worthy, Click Here
Note: This book was an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) kindly provided by the publisher (Hay House) via NetGalley.
This was my first read of Christiane Northrup, despite the fact she’s written lots of books, with titles like: Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being, The Wisdom of Menopause: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing During the Change and Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing (39 editions published).
The health and sexuality sections held less interest to me, probably because I was attracted to the book after listening to her speak in a ‘raw and real’ conversation with my favourite ‘intuitive’ Colette Baron-Reid, in that conversation it was the more spiritual aspects that were under discussion, particularly as Colette’s book Uncharted: The Journey through Uncertainty to Infinite Possibility had been published in October 2016. Northrup is a fan of Colette Baron-Reid and mentions that she uses her Wisdom of the Oracle card deck as one of her spiritual tools for guidance.
She also discusses thoughts and inputs, the effect of what we are constantly exposed to and how it should be managed in order to avoid overdosing on negativity and the toxic, fear-enhancing effect of the media for example. She discusses the positive power of affirmations, meditation, gratitude, the power of giving and receiving, connecting with nature, tapping and much more.
I’ve been listening to Colette Baron Reid’s insights for a while, I often look up her wisdom cards online and follow her 
It’s a consciousness raising view of reality, one that will resonate with enlightened readers, empaths, those familiar with working with energies and the open-minded.
Anita Moorjani wrote her first book Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing after being tracked down by the late Wayne Dyer, who’d come across her story on the internet and wanted to know more about what she had experienced on the day she had been expected to die but miraculously returned from stage four cancer to heal totally and live.
Given this, our world is a classroom in which we have abundant opportunities to heal and transform. Through this lens we are our flat tyre, the butterfly on the windowsill, the flooded basement.
There are practical exercises throughout the book to encourage reflection of both our inner and outer worlds. Acceptance, awareness and forgiveness are necessities: we are human, imperfect, but at the same time magnificent Divine co-creators of our life.
Word by Word 