Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Seven Stars
1 The Star of Self-Belief
2 The Star of Harmony
3 The Star of Gratitude
4 The Star of Trust
5 The Star of Courage
6 The Star of Peace
7 The Star of Love
Conclusion: An Eternity of Stars
Further Reading
Useful Addresses
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Believe and Receive is a collection of incredible true stories and celestial wisdom from two of the best-loved angel experts in the world. Following the success of An Angel Forever and Angel Awakenings, Glennyce S. Eckersley and Gary Quinn have been inundated with requests from people eager to know how to bring the wonder of the angels into their lives. This dazzling book is the answer.
Believe and Receive will take you on a heavenly journey around seven stars. Discover how each start is linked to a special angel and be amazed by the miracles that angels work in real life. Practical exercises, affirmations and meditations will help you experience each angel’s special qualities for yourself. You will find ways to strengthen your self-belief and courage, experience harmony and trust, and know the true meaning of peace and love. Whether you wish to become closer to the angels, or simply want to improve your life, Believe and Receive will help you find your own lucky star.
Glennyce Eckersley is an international angel expert and the author of many successful books, including An Angel at My Shoulder and Saved by the Angels. She lives in Manchester, UK.
Gary Quinn is a spiritual teacher, leading intuitive life coach and popular author whose books include May the Angels Be with You and Living in the Spiritual Zone. He is the founder of Our Living Centre in Los Angeles, California.
Glennyce and Gary are the co-authors of An Angel Forever and Angel Awakenings. They have appeared many times in the media individually and together, and run successful workshops on both sides of the Atlantic.
Bring the Guidance and Wisdom
of the Angels into Your Life
The morning star of this new day, looks on a different world.
Little Book of Miracles
THIS BOOK WILL take you on a celestial journey around seven special stars. As you will discover, each star represents particular angelic powers and embodies key qualities such as self-belief, love and peace. Through intriguing stories, inspiring quotations and a variety of practical exercises, you will find out how to tap into these celestial powers and bring them into your own life.
Why seven stars? First, let us turn to the number seven. As authors and angel experts, we have become increasingly aware of and fascinated by the number seven. And in this we are not alone: more and more people appear to be studying the qualities of this intriguing digit, as shown by the increasing number of magazine articles and workshops offering insights into it. Seven is of course a hugely significant number in literature, music (there are seven basic notes) and mathematics, and it is often thought of as being a particularly holy number, sacred in many senses of the word, seven surfaces being regarded as significant in all major religions and in many ancient beliefs.
Many people think that seven is a number that has mystical properties. Whether we realise it or not, it dominates many aspects of our existence. According to Shakespeare’s As You Like It, even our lives can be measured in seven ages: the infant, the schoolchild, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the pantaloon and the second childhood. In ancient wisdom, the soul of man was believed to consist of seven properties, which were under the influence of the seven planets or ‘stars’. Similarly, there were the ancient seven pillars of wisdom. In yogic teaching, seven basic colours are attributed to the chakras (the energy points in the body), and there are those who are able to see the seven colours as they manifest in personal auras. There are of course seven colours in the rainbow.
According to the Bible, the average life span of a man was three score years and ten, making the number 70 or seven decades. The Creation story in the Bible features the seven days in which the firmament was completed, and it is said that God created seven levels of heaven, hence the expression ‘in seventh heaven’. In the Old Testament, the Pharaoh of ancient Egypt had a dream featuring seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine. The leader Moses, who led the Israelites out of Egypt and received the Ten Commandments, was of the seventh generation after Abraham. In the Judaic tradition, the Jewish festival of Sukkot was to last seven days by God’s command, with Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah occurring in the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar. When a close relative dies, many Jewish families will still sit shiva for seven days. Moving to the New Testament, the final book of the Bible, Revelation, describes a scroll with seven seals, which inspired film director Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal. Even today, each week in the Western calendar has seven days, with the seventh day being ‘holy’ in Christian tradition.
The eighteenth-century mystic and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg wrote extensively about the significance of the number seven. In Arcana Celestia (vol 1) he talks about the seven days of creation and the seven stages of regeneration of the human spirit. He writes about the significance of numbers in the Bible, including the number seven: ‘When seven occurs, instead of seven, what is holy comes to the angels.’ Swedenborg taught that there are groups of angels in heaven that are constantly aware of people, especially children, reading the Bible. When the word seven is read it implies holiness to the angels. This is why the seventh day, for instance, is regarded as holy.
The Rev. David Gaffney, a Swedenborgian scholar and musician, teaches these revelations in his workshops and notes that: ‘The seven notes of the musical scale also represent both the seven stages of creation of the cosmos and the seven stages of creation of the human spirit.’ There are in fact seven archangels: Michael, Jophiel, Chamuuel, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel and Zadkiel. (As we will see in Star of Trust, each angel is associated with a particular colour.) Seven notes are also fundamental to the ancient but recently rediscovered nine-pointed enneagram, which is becoming so popular with all kinds of groups as a tool for character analysis.
So the number seven continues to intrigue us to this day with its many associations. However, an equally interesting influence lies in the heavens, with the stars. From early childhood, many of us discover a fascination with the stars that never fades. Indeed, who can look up at a night sky filled with glittering constellations without feeling awe and wonder? As human beings, we are quite literally bursts of starlight – sharing our atoms with the material of the stars, as we do indeed with all living things. (The atoms we share are simply arranged in a different order.) The connection is very real and the saying ‘look to the stars’ highly appropriate when we want to boost our connection with nature and increase our self-belief.
Indigenous peoples set great store by the heavenly constellations, as did ancient mariners. Particularly revered, especially by the Native Americans, was Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, which is composed of seven stars. It was believed that the stars were actually people who had died. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem Hiawatha the young Hiawatha is told that at midnight, after her death, his grandmother has been thrown into the sky and that the beautiful star he can see is his grandmother.
The wonder of the stars is also reflected in the science of astrology. Many of us check our horoscope diligently, even though we may not believe it, and consider the practice just a little bit of fun. However, the study of the planets and their influence on our lives goes much deeper than might be suggested by most horoscopes in magazines and newspapers. Astrologers claim that their detailed astrological charts show how the planets influence not only each individual but also world events.
In our consideration of the number seven and the stars, we cannot forget the angels who have links with both the mystical digit and the heavens. When working on this book, it seemed a logical step for us to combine the special number seven with angels and stars. As you will see, these angelic stars and their properties are connected to demanding areas of modern life that sometimes require a touch of extra inspiration. So many people are looking for a little guidance and support, which we fervently hope will be found within these pages. (And we should just like to point out that the first edition of this book is published in 2007 … the number seven again!)
In each chapter, the practical exercises are designed to encourage you to engage creatively with your situation, to give you more insight, courage and harmony in your life, including the freedom to let go of things that aren't working for you, to ask for what you deserve to experience, and to be the kind of person you know you should be. (Please don’t be afraid of failing, or of doing any of the exercises wrong – that’s impossible!) The meditations in each chapter will enable you to tune into your inner thoughts and intuition, as well as into the angelic powers already present in your life – but which you may not always be aware of. If repeated or posted prominently where they catch your eye, the affirmations will help to strengthen your links with the celestial realms, while the Angel Top Tips and Divine Stars offer heavenly food for thought. The true stories show the angels at work in the lives of ordinary people around the world.
We would like to add that – as the title suggests – the whole concept of this book is based on the principle of believe and receive. Today many people refer to this principle as ‘Cosmic Ordering’, which might seem like just another modern fad to perhaps be ignored. Cosmic Ordering is, however, merely a new title for an ancient belief system. In his gospel, St Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, ‘Ask and it shall be given unto you.’ Where exactly does He say this? Why, in chapter seven, verse seven, of course!
In Believe and Receive, seven chapters will help you navigate your way around seven angelic stars in a magical journey that could enrich your life for ever …
Happy star-gazing!
Glennyce S. Eckersley and Gary Quinn
1
If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you … you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.
Mary Pickford,
American actress, 1893–1979
SELF-BELIEF IS ONE of the building blocks of a happy life. To enjoy a full, positive existence and to create positive change in the world around us, we must first have self-belief. If we believe in ourselves and believe the angels are there to help us, the sky is literally the limit as to what we can achieve. However, in order to experience true self-belief, we may have to do a little work first in order to change ourselves from within.
You may already be familiar with the expression ‘you are what you eat’. Let’s take that one step further by saying ‘you are what you think’. The mind is a very powerful tool, as everything we do or say to implement change in our lives originates from a single thought. Therefore it is important to identify what it is in life we wish to change or accomplish, for as we think it, so we will become it. To make our thoughts lead to positive changes, we have to ground them in powerful self-belief.
However, our past experiences may mean that we initially lack conviction that we can achieve our goals, and we may need to overcome the negative thought patterns that are holding us back. In such cases, this maxim can be very handy: ‘Fake it till you make it’! If we give out positive vibes, not only will we be sending out the right messages to others, but we may convince ourselves in the process! Nevertheless, as we will see later in this chapter, we may have to abolish some patterns of negative thinking that condition how we respond to the world. For many of us, when things begin to look a little difficult, those all too familiar feelings of self-doubt and failure creep in. It is at this point that we need to push those negative thoughts from our minds and grasp the concept that, provided we believe in ourselves, our aims are truly possible, and then we will receive the help necessary to achieve them.
What are your own goals in life? Are they related to your career or does your personal life need serious attention? Once you have clear goals in mind, you can get to work on achieving them. The process may require patience and a little perseverance, as you will see in this chapter – after all, if you have doubted yourself for many years, it may take a little time to recover your self-belief. To get yourself motivated, pause for a moment and consider the following question: when the film of your life is played at the end of this journey, do you want it to be a boring, safe documentary? Instead, why not let it be an epic, exciting and full of evidence of gifts well used, and a record of your true appreciation of the world around you, of nature and of people?
In the matter of achieving your goals in life, it’s not so much the case that ‘seeing is believing’ as ‘believing is seeing’. With a little self-belief, what wonderful things might you see in your life? If you truly believed in yourself, what do you think you could achieve? Anything is possible …
By exploring the Star of Self-Belief you will discover ways to transform how you feel about yourself. You will learn how your conditioning affects your life and also discover how to prioritise your goals and then achieve them, whilst learning how to identify your true passions in life and then attract new opportunities to yourself. So don’t be afraid to reach out to the future – it’s only change!
Angel Top Tip To strengthen your own connection with the heavens, go outside and look at the sky on a clear and starry night. Then, choose a star or even a constellation, and make it your own. Know that whenever you gaze upon this heavenly body and ask the angels to be with you, a positive reply will be forthcoming. In turn, this practice will help to lift your spirits whenever you need a boost.
As our lives reflect what we feel about ourselves, we must first learn to love ourselves before we can love others. This means getting to know and accept ourselves. It also means learning to listen to ourselves. Let’s begin on a physical level. Quite simply – what is your body telling you?
Read through the whole exercise first and, when you have memorised what to do, begin.
Start by sitting comfortably in a darkened room. Relax into your chair, visualising a blue light at the top of your head. Picture this blue light travelling the length of your body, from the crown of your head to the tips of your toes, a short section at a time.
Self-belief is a quality that develops with us as we go through life. From our earliest childhood our self-belief may have been influenced by a variety of factors, some of which we may be aware of, such as the day-to-day routines of our homes and the demands of our upbringing, and others that may lurk below the surface of our consciousness.
Our minds are full of subconscious thoughts and attitudes, which lead us throughout the day. Do we think twice, for instance, about the direction we take on leaving home each day? Similarly, if we are experienced drivers we don’t consciously think about where the clutch or the brake is in the car. We simply respond automatically. How many of us talk on the telephone whilst cooking or loading the washing machine or opening the day’s mail? We do not think about each task, we are pre-programmed by our brains to get on with it. The same is true of our state of mind; we may have been programmed to think negatively in our present lives because of events that occurred many years ago in childhood.
Many of us will have been raised in environments that didn’t encourage us to think for ourselves but that urged us instead to look outwards for answers. We may have become overly dependent on others for their opinions, and thereby lost confidence in the value of our own decisions, gradually eroding our innate self-belief. We may have become fixed in the way that we view the world and how we expect life to unfold. And once we believe something, we may be tempted to shut the door to everything outside of, or opposed to, that belief and to stop enquiring about ourselves. This process is called ‘conditioning’ and it creates the patterns whereby we subconsciously restrict our lives. However, there are various techniques and exercises that we can use to undo some of the conditioning that ties us down. One way is simply to spring clean our minds.
This exercise is designed to help you achieve a new level of mental fitness by helping you to disentangle yourself from conditioning and from old negative habits so that you can rise into a fresh awareness. It is a process, paralleling nature, of revealing yourself to yourself. Your rewards will be new insights, improved wellbeing and increased understanding of how your life works.
You are going to explore how you currently regard self-belief by writing down detailed answers to the following questions. Please be honest without censoring yourself by being self-conscious or self-judgemental. If you don't know the answer to something, you may either have a guess at it or write ‘don't know’. You may discover that spending a few minutes contemplating your thoughts before you write down the answers might have a profound effect on your life. Enjoy the questions and think without any limits, coming up with at least three potential responses for each open-ended question. What you believe is what you believe, and know that the truth you discover is your truth.
To acquire the awareness of the Divine, one need not journey to any special region or place. It is enough if the eye is turned inwards. In the Bhagavad Gita, the inner reality, the Atma, is described as ‘splendorous like a billion suns’. But man has not become aware of the light and power within.
Sri Sathya Sai Baba
Religious leader and philosopher
Happily, we are never completely at the mercy of our conditioning, for within each one of us lies a Higher Power that contains all the answers we need. Emanuel Swedenborg called this power our ‘Inner Angel’, and claimed that the more we ‘exercise’ our Inner Angel the more response we will receive from the Inner Angel in others. He taught that we are all in fact ‘trainee angels’ and that we are here on earth specifically because of the intention of the Divine to raise us to the realms of angels in the afterlife. We are therefore all connected to the Divine and to all of creation. Our journey in life is not only a geographical one, but should also be an inner one, searching for our very own inner angel.
Swedenborg also stated that we have the ability to access this part of ourselves at any moment in order to discover exactly what choices need to be made in our lives. Although in these modern times the majority of us have become distracted by the demands of daily life and unable to recognise the true guidance of our inner angels, with a little practice we can all open up those channels of communication again.
Initially, this process may involve exercises that promote self-understanding and self-enquiry, but once we start the process, the guidance of our inner angel will come to us in many forms. It can be likened to a sort of spiritual intuition, a deep feeling or inner ‘voice’. As we get to know ourselves and feel increasingly comfortable searching within our own hearts and minds for the answers we need, we may even find our self-belief returning …
To begin to connect with your own Inner Angel or intuition, find a little time to practise the exercises in this chapter. You could make a start by simply repeating the affirmation below a couple of times today.
Today, I am blessed with the gift of confidence and all my actions have direction and purpose.
Changing your life can be as simple as changing your mind. If you choose to believe in life and choose to be enriched by life, you will be free to act in the fullness of any moment.
So many of us go through life suffering from low self-esteem and the belief that we are somehow unworthy. When Gary and I met Lynn, we were reminded of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. Apparently, Hans Christian Andersen was a very unattractive man physically and many of his tales were intended to encourage readers to look beyond the outward appearances of things. His well-loved story ‘The Ugly Duckling’ is a prime example of this philosophy. Like the Ugly Duckling in the story, Lynn was convinced she was unattractive. In fact, she was so ashamed of her appearance that she didn’t even dare to apply for jobs that, with her qualifications in design, she knew she could easily perform. It is difficult to know just how or where Lynn’s insecurity first took root, as she was in fact a pretty girl.
Having attended one of our angel workshops, she arrived home at the end of the day determined to ask for angelic help. Focusing on the affirmation ‘My mind is at perfect ease’ and lighting a candle, she meditated on the concept that freedom of thought and deed were indeed within her grasp – if she trusted her angels, she decided, her personal freedom would surely follow.
The following day, Lynn received a phone call. To her surprise, it was from a woman she had met at the angel workshop. During the lunch break, the two of them had shared their enthusiasm for the world of interior design. Impressed by Lynn’s design qualifications, the woman was calling now to ask if Lynn would be interested in attending an interview for a position with her own design company. Little had Lynn realised that her lunchtime chat would lead to this outcome.
Sometime later Lynn found herself working for her new friend, happy and secure, with good prospects for promotion and a wonderful outlet for her talents. Now that her self-belief had been totally restored, her happiness allowed her beauty to shine through and she was truly transformed into a swan!
‘Angels are firmly part of my everyday thinking now, and I never go to bed without thanking God for his angelic messengers, who stepped into my life when I needed them most,’ Lynn confides. As she discovered, we all have inner depths as yet unplumbed; we all have greater potential than we may realise and often we are the only ones who prevent ourselves from achieving our goals.
Light tomorrow with today!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Poet (1806–61)
Angel Top Tip The Universe will always support us when we commit ourselves with complete certainty, confidence and limitless trust. Then we will find the resources we need within ourselves to move into a greater sphere of action.
Beliefs create a cause-and-effect link between your self and the Universe. Whenever a situation doesn’t work out the way you would like it to, and you are wracked by self-doubt or feel unable to move forward, you may be tempted to give up. This is precisely when you most need to realise that the angels are always with you, offering you the compassionate guidance and support you need. You are always supported by the angels and will accomplish the purpose of your life in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. If you live with this knowledge, you will find it much easier to feel positive about your situation, however difficult it appears, and to expect good things to happen in your life. The Universe will seem like a much friendlier place.
Meditation is one way to tune into the angelic realms and, believe it or not, anyone can meditate. As you will discover in the meditations in this book, you will simply need to find a window of calm and a little willpower to help you focus.
Meditation is a time of quiet, when the mind is freed from its attachment to the ravings of a world gone mad. It is a silence in which the spirit of God can enter us and work his divine alchemy upon us.
Marianne Williamson
Spiritual activist, author and lecturer
Beliefs are the thought forms through which we create, interpret and interact with reality. Use this meditation to tune into the support of the Universe and commit to the belief that the angels are already there waiting to help you, thereby transcending all the expectations you've ever had. In this moment let the angelic realm transform your life. Shut the door, turn off the phone, put the pets in another room and make sure that you cannot be disturbed for the next 20 minutes.
Today, I am surrounded by the love of the Universe and supported by my angels. I make the conscious choice to go forward in faith rather than backwards in fear.
Today, I use the insights of timeless wisdom to light my way as I explore my real self.
There are other tools in addition to meditation that you can draw upon whenever you need to call on your inner resources. This exercise in particular is designed to help you tap into the feelings of being strong and in charge whenever your confidence is flagging.
You will need:
A pen and paper
A carefully chosen small object such as a pebble, a piece of yellow crystal (e.g. citrine) or a beautiful sea shell.
Life begets life, energy creates energy. It is only by spending oneself that one becomes rich.
Sarah Bernhardt
French stage actress (1844–1923)
The angels gave Janice a special symbol of their presence when she most needed to receive one.
The move was always going to be an upheaval for Janice but the fragile state of her mother’s health had placed even more pressure on her. For some time, Janice had been worried about the elderly lady, who lived thousands of miles away in the northern state of Michigan with Janice’s younger sister. This arrangement had been a blessing, but now her sister had a young family and it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to cope with her mother’s worsening condition. As Janice was based in the southern states of America she only saw her mother infrequently, so she had decided to move closer to her and share the caring duties. Although it meant selling her house and leaving her friends and a community that she felt very much a part of, Janice knew she wanted to help at this very difficult phase in her mother’s life.
The move had taken place and one evening Janice found herself sitting in the garden of her sister’s house, looking up at the night sky and wondering if she really had the inner strength for the task ahead. The two sisters remarked on how beautiful the night sky was that evening, with its brilliant stars and a huge, round moon. Suddenly, both women gasped, for there in the middle of the stars a cloud formation had appeared in the shape of two huge angels. One angel had the moon shining through as its face, whilst the adjoining cloud angel had a halo of light and two massive wings. So clear and perfect were these cloud angels amongst the moon and stars that the sisters say it gave them ‘goosebumps’. A warm intense feeling of self-belief swept through Janice and she suddenly knew for certain she would be able to face the future with the angels watching over her.
I think that wherever your journey takes you,
There are new gods waiting there
With divine patience – and laughter.
Susan M. Watkins
Author
Each day, repeat an affirmation before you leave the house. Be determined that the day will contain angels and sunshine, even if it is raining!
Today, I claim power to choose my life's path in a new direction and celebrate my life.
I centre my mind upon only the positives of life.