a little book about believing

I want to introduce you to my new book. These past few weeks it’s been gaining a lot of media attention and a huge response from the public. I am so incredibly grateful to all those who have written to me saying how much they love it and what a help it has been in their lives. I’ve been quite moved by the reaction.

So if I may, I’d like to give you some background to what happened, because it’s a lesson to all of us about the importance of having faith and remaining true to your vision, regardless of what anyone else says.

A Quick Turning-Dreams-into-Reality Masterclass

Years ago, while I was filming my TV show, I met an amazing guy who was worth many millions of dollars, all self-made. By trade he was a tiler. In the early days of his marriage he lived a modest life with his new bride, paying his way by tiling bathroom and kitchen walls and floors every day. That was the extent of his world. And back then, don’t forget, tiling was a grueling business, not the breeze it is today. Every tile had to be aligned painstakingly with the ones either side of it. Miss, even by a millimeter, and the whole thing would be left crooked. Which is why so many tiled floors or walls from around then had some flaw in ‘em that didn’t look right, remember?

Then this guy – let’s call him Mike – had a brilliant, brilliant but incredibly simple idea. How about if he made little splints that could be inserted between the tiles as he was laying them, ensuring that each one would be equidistant from its neighbor? Blindingly obvious, right? Yet, incredibly, nobody had thought of this before.

So, super-excited, he went to his wife, who by this time was heavily pregnant, and told her not to get too comfortable. “I have big news!” He was going to sell their house to raise funds to start a business, manufacturing tile spacers. Well, naturally the poor dear freaked out. She was numbed with anxiety, she told me, and thought he was nuts. And his friends thought the same. But Mike persisted, sold the family home, and launched his spacer company.

And guess what, they were a hit. Not only in the U.S. either, but all over the world, as you can imagine, as tilers everywhere rushed to buy this little widget that would make their job a thousand times easier. And each time a store sold a set anywhere across the globe, Mike got a cut of the profits. So much so that, by the time I met him, the money was pouring in so fast and in such volume that he’d already run out of ways to spend it. He had everything he and his now-thoroughly-convinced-he-was-a-genius wife could dream of. Yet still the money kept coming.

So what secret did Mike know that most people don’t?

Two things: 1) He had faith. Not religious faith, but a simple, unerring belief in the voice of his intuition, telling him to support his idea, overcome his doubts, go for broke, tear down the barricades of opposition, and persist. Never give up, in other words. ‘Faith’, someone once said, ‘is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.’ Clear away the white noise and clutter that’s blocking the signal emanating from your soul, and let that signal guide you to your goal.

And the second thing he had: 2) was fortitude. Stickability. The drive and determination to follow his idea through from conception to birth.

Anyway, the only reason I mention this is because I went through exactly the same scenario last year. I’d given up three years of my life to write a book that my agent and my editor  were opposed to. It was quite a daunting time.

The Opposition

a little book about believing is not a religious book, but a fascinating and inspiring work about spirituality and nutrition. It’s like THE SECRET, only this time about health and healing, and could be the thing that saves your life.

Basically, I joined a group of 24 people on a life-saving trip to spend time with faith healer John of God. The results were mind-blowing. Miracles happened while we were there. Discoveries were made that were truly extraordinary. We saw things and felt things that we’d never experienced before. The biggest discovery of all related to healing. Doctors can take it so far, we found, but in the end only you can do what’s necessary to save your life. Faith healers like John of God may help too, but the individual must play his or her part, by making changes. As it says on the jacket, there’s only one savior, and it’s YOU.

In a world where, statistically, one in two people – that’s 50% of us – will likely be diagnosed with cancer at some point in our lives, and where we see our friends, loved ones, and workmates dying around us, this book is one of the most reassuring pick-me-ups you could ever find, especially as a gift for someone who has been misled into believing that cancer is an automatic death sentence. An oncologist friend of mine told me a few months ago, “The biggest obstacle to my patients getting well is their belief that they’re not going to.” Believing is everything.

Well, forgive me, but I thought this would make a terrific book and potentially help millions of people. My agent, though, was adamant – nobody would be interested. And I was crushed.

For about a minute.

Never down for long, I decided to change agents. Approached a guy I knew who worked for a big New York agency. He loved my previous work, and, sure enough, he loved this too. Adored it actually, and said so. “I couldn’t put it down,” he gushed in an email. Which, to be honest, is what everyone says. “It kept me awake at nights thinking about it.” Which is also what everyone says. So clearly he’d want to represent it, right? Wrong!  Too dangerous. “If I represent this, I’ll be in trouble. I come from a family of doctors. They’ll never forgive me.”

Unbelievable. I could not get this simple little joy-filled book through the system. A book that would not only entertain people and make them think, but might actually save their lives.

On the other hand, something I did realize: he didn’t really mean it was dangerous, did he? He meant it was new and different, and he was scared of it. That’s been true of many wonderful books in the past. Everything from Harry Potter to Chicken Soup for the Soul, they’ve all met with resistance at the start. Obstacles are part of the game.

It was then that it struck me.

What I was facing here was not opposition, was it? It was series of sobering encounters with reality, to help me clarify my intention and galvanize my resolve. That’s all adversity is. It clarifies and galvanizes. Only when you’re faced with obstacles and setbacks do you find out what you’re made of. Did I believe in my wonderful little book enough to keep going with it through thick and thin until it made it to the stores? That was the question.

YES! –  was the answer. Because, although I may lack certain qualities in other areas – God only knows! – I do have one quality which has got me through many a tight scrape in my life, and that’s fortitude. Otherwise called follow-through. Or persistence.

In the words of Sir Winston Churchill, I “…never, never, never, never give up.”

The Pay-Off

And sure enough, my fortitude paid off. The book is now a glorious, wonderful paperback. The kind of paperback I want to stroke and hug and flick through countless times, even though I know every word in it. Because I also know the amount of persistence it took to fend off the naysayers and get it to this point. If I built it, they would come, I was convinced of it.

And you know what? They did come. They came in impressive numbers, gushing praise, proving the naysayers wrong.

“Started reading the book last night at elevenish,” someone wrote on Twitter last week. “Read til 4am, passed out. Finished it today less than an hour ago. I have you and your exquisite little book to thank for changing my life forever, intimately and positively.”

I almost fainted.

“Your book is important, incredibly well written, and totally compelling,” someone else wrote.

And today I found another comment on Facebook: “Wonderful, surprising, challenging, eye-opening, sensitive, touching….I’m running out of words. Just get it and read it. You will discover things about yourself, and about everything else! It’s life changing!!”

On page 18 of a little book about believing, it says the following:

“In this book we are crossing a bridge into the unknown, ready to challenge some of our holiest preconceptions about health and healing. In my view that’s a good thing. The mere fact that we’re discussing this topic at all will bring us to a place of new understanding. A place where hopefully someday we, the ordinary people, may not be such easy prey for serious illness and can instead choose to be its master, or even avoid it altogether.

“It’s an exciting journey, one that requires a flexible mind, a willing heart, and a readiness to release ingrained attitudes.”

Releasing ingrained attitudes is what the book industry needs to do too, by the sound of it. If they can turn their back on my ‘little book that could’, what other gems are they not publishing either? If you too have aspirations to write a book – or do anything else, frankly – and you believe in it enough and feel like the idea came from your very soul, then maybe all you need is to summon the necessary amount of faith and fortitude, keep your head held high, and never, never, never, never give up ’til you push on past the finish line. Fortitude and faith made a simple tiler a multi-millionaire and bought an ordinary engineer a yacht. What could they do for you?

a little book about believing: The Transformative Healing Power of Faith, Love, and Surrender (Penner Press).

Read an article on Patheos.com written by Cash about the book and the power of prayer to help heal the body. 

Advertisement