10 Weeks to Love and Abundance Introduction: Part 1 of 11

Hey there everybody. Today we are going to be talking about my newest book, 10 Weeks to Love and Abundance. I am your host and the author, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Now the ebook of 10 Weeks to Love and Abundance is available on Kindle or for free on Kindle Unlimited or you can purchase the PDF for $1.99 at doc snipes.com books each chapter in this book starts with a self assessment and provides five activities per week to help you apply each of the ten principles of love in order to help you reduce stress, improve health and use your energy to nurture what's important to create abundance in your life. Now you may be asking yourself, what are the ten principles of love? Well, as I've outlined in the book, Patience, enjoyment of the moment Respect of self and others Forgiveness of yourself and others Earnestness in all you do Compassion for yourself and others Truthfulness with yourself and others. Do you see a theme here? Selflessness, meekness and endurance. And when I talk about endurance, what we're talking about is courage and perseverance in the face of challenges. Within the book you will also find additional links to other video resources to further enhance what's in the book so you can learn a little bit more if you so desire. What can you use this book for? Well, I tried to make the book pretty practical and by giving you five activities per week it makes it so it can be used, for example, in a work setting to help team building. You can use it as an individual just for self improvement. You can use it with your family, you know, with your, your kids, your spouse, whatever, in order to improve communication and strengthen family relationships. And you can even use it for community building, such as through church activities, community centers or libraries where you may want to have a bookstore study. In order to develop love and abundance, you need to first start thinking about what's blocking your abundance. Well, unfortunately in our society we get a lot of messages that resources and relationships are scarce. Everything's a competition. This increases our anxiety about the possibility of losing and anger at anybody who gets in the way of our winning. We want to be in control. When we start to feel this concept of scarcity, we have a greater need to be in control. Anger, anxiety, grief, depression, stress or pain triggers your body's threat response system, which is also called the HPA axis. The HPA axis alters your hormones, your brain chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, and your energy levels to help you respond to the threat. Unfortunately, when the HPA axis is activated too frequently or for too long it results in dysfunction, which leads to problems in your health, mood, memory, attention, relationships, and more. So let's talk about the effects of stress. When that HPA axis is chronically activated, it impairs your sleep, which is going to make you feel more fatigued anyway. But it also impaired sleep, has a whole host of other effects, including altering your immune system and increasing pain levels. It increases fatigue not just because you're not getting enough sleep, but because you're using a lot of energy. Being stressed out, it increases pain and inflammation due to a reduction in your natural painkillers, your endorphins, increases in muscle tension, poor posture, and increased oxidative stress. Now, oxidative stress is the stuff that happens as a byproduct of your body functioning normally. There's a, what we'll call an average level that your body goes through each night, basically, and sort of sweeps out. Think about it as the cleaning crew for your body. It cleans out all of the free radicals that contribute to oxidative stress. However, when you're stressed out, you produce a whole lot more free radicals, which adds to your oxidative stress. And sometimes the cleaning crew can't keep up, which contributes to systemic inflammation. Chronic stress increases your blood pressure and the risk of cardiovascular disease and even cancer. It reduces your libido, impairs blood sugar regulation, reduces immunity and worsens autoimmune issues, contributes to other unpleasant emotions. Because emotions are like a club, where one goes, the other usually follows. So if you feel depressed, you may also start feeling guilty about being depressed and not having enough energy and angry about the fact that you can't seem to shake the depression. Likewise, if you're happy, other things like curiosity and compassion for follow that. So we want to join the happy club, basically. Chronic stress impairs attention, memory and learning, which makes it even harder to do your job and do it effectively. It can impair judgment and effective decision making, leading to more mistakes. It negatively impacts relationships because if you're under stress, if you're fatigued, if you're grumpy a lot, if you don't have any motivation to go out and, you know, do things with your friends, those relationships are going to dwindle and it reduces resources that could help you flourish because you are agitated, depressed, and focusing on competition instead of cooperation. So addressing stress, addressing chronic stress by developing love and abundance is the way to turn your attention to the opposite of what's going on right now. Abundance means knowing that you will always be able to get your needs met. You may not get everything you want, all the time, when you want it. That's just not reasonable. But abundance means knowing that you can get your needs met and create a life that is fulfilling. A mindset of love and abundance can help you feel more empowered, content, hopeful, happy, and encourage behaviors of cooperation and synergy. You're not as worried about competing and getting something before somebody else does. You know there's plenty to go around, and you know that you've developed resources that can help support you when you when you do have needs that need to be met. Before you begin your journey, it's important to have a vision of what life, a life of love and abundance, looks like for you. Your life of love, love and abundance may be very different than mine, and that's okay. But you need to know what your goal is. You want to know you know where you're headed. The book gives you some writing prompts to start helping you define your goals so you know what that end point is. In the next video, we'll introduce you to Chapter one. Patience.