Excerpt
I have found over years of doing speaking engagements, individual sessions and call-in radio shows that there are some concepts that people cannot hear enough times. One of these is the universal Law that we do not have love, we are love. There are Universal Truths like this that you, the reader, will see over and over again in this book.

The repeated reinforcement of these profound Truths is neither there by accident nor a redundancy that simply escaped proper editing. It is there as a visual psycho-spiritual healing. Human beings have a talent of incessantly and tenaciously fixating on a constant drone of negative “inner dialog” messages about their value, power and worth. The purpose behind these echoed ideas is to make the Truth about our Divinity as clear, certain, familiar and tangible as we have made our fears and insecurities.

I feel it is also worth mentioning that I wrote this book for all the people who told me that they wanted a book with short, quick chapters, as they tended to consume a book slowly over time. They wanted a book that they not only could learn a lot from, but also would allow them to read a few chapters, then come back to it in a week or month and be able to pick it up, without having to remember precisely the focus of the earlier segments. Each chapter is short and sweet and stands alone. The entire book covers different aspects of wisdom, so it is not slighting the reader in quality of content or depth of practical knowledge.

My favorite joke about my life is that before I was born, God asked, “Who wants to learn from more pain?” I must have thought he said “more gain” and asked for extra.

My life challenges began at birth. I was born with a birth defect on my face. Although I underwent several cosmetic surgeries to correct the problem, it was still visually evident until in my late teens, early twenties. My parents divorced and remarried numerous times. Often this revolving door of parents brought with it the dynamics of alcoholism, abuse and years of parental neglect.

At the age of eight, I could barely read or write. I did not even know how to spell my last name! As a result I was placed in a special education program designed to bring problem students up to speed with the rest of their class. Over the next few years my special education teacher patiently spent hour after hour teaching me how to read, write and speak properly. She became the nurturing, unconditionally loving mother figure I so desperately needed. Then suddenly, she was violently murdered by someone who wanted to make the crime look like it was a ritualistic killing. Needless to say her homicide was inconceivably horrible. I was so traumatized by her death, I suppressed all memories of her until a few years later when the police caught the assumed killer. With the resurgence of the incident in everyone’s conversations, I allowed my memory of her to resurface.

Like most everyone else, I have been lied to and cheated on by nearly all my intimate relationships. I also went through an ugly divorce, what has become a normal right of passage into adulthood.

I have been diagnosed terminal twice: once from an illness and the second time from car accident injuries. I have experienced years and years of the kind of physical pain you would jump off a building to get out of. (Good thing I lived on the first floor most of this time.) When it came time for the car accident trial, I lost. I was buried in legal and medical expenses. I lost my business and my entire life savings. If suffering were a buffet, I have apparently sampled everything at least once and gone back for seconds on the really juicy items.
The gift of earning a Ph.D. in suffering is that I learned how to resolve it and use it for my benefit. I clearly recognize what causes this limitation we call suffering in the flow of our lives. I also understand what wisdom releases it, or at the very least, diminishes its destructive impact. To have any authentic value in life, wisdom has to be practical in both its understanding as well as its application. If the wisdom you have is not pulling your butt consistently out of life’s many fires, it is meaningless! Real wisdom detoxifies you and develops within you the strength, power and agility to handle whatever obstacles life throws your way.

The process of repeated self-resurrection has blessed me with a profound canon of wisdom that covers vast territory in the realm of the human experience. Every life challenge that is a source of suffering is like an oyster stimulated by a grain of sand, resulting in the growth of a pearl. In my case suffering produced great pearls of wisdom. Wisdom Rising is a collection of those pearls, strung together to create a jeweled accessory stylish enough to adorn and compliment the remarkable and extraordinary wardrobe know as the human experience.
Wear it with all my love and Blessings, and dazzle the world with your stellar, eternal, Divine beauty.

Love, Vaishāli (April 2008)