How to Rule the World from Your Couch - Softcover

Laura Day is the New York Times bestselling author of Practical Intuition and has spent over two decades helping companies as well as individuals use the power of intuition to achieve their dreams. Her global clientele includes celebrities, scientists, business executives, and other professionals. She speaks regularly both here and abroad, and has appeared in numerous publications (Marie Claire, People Magazine, Newsweek) and on television including CNN, The View, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Fox News, and Good Morning America.

How to Rule the World from Your Couch CHAPTER 1
An Overview

He whom the ancients called an expert in battle gained victory where victory was easily gained. Thus the battle of an expert is never an exceptional victory, nor does it win him reputation for wisdom or credit for courage. His victories in battle are unerring. unerring means that he acts where victory is certain, and conquers an enemy that has already lost.

—SUN TZU



How to Rule the World from Your Couch is meant to inspire you to be fully aware, conscious, active, dynamic, and alive in every single moment of your life. Much of this can be done in your pajamas, in total comfort, from wherever you want to be and with the people you want to be with, as you move through what we all know as “normal life.” The “normal life” you want. You do not have to be full of get-up-and-go to have success, find love, or earn a living. There are tools, innate tools that permit you to do much of the heavy lifting without your feet even touching the floor.

For more than twenty years, I have used and taught these tools to make businesses stronger, to help people find love, heal their own bodies, communicate with loved ones from afar, talk to their children when their children were unwilling to listen, to make better decisions to change the future in the immediate present, and to help people understand how to create their own dreams. Some of these dreams seemed impossible to achieve at the outset. From challenges such as these, techniques were developed to create dazzling results in less time with less work. As I will explain, most of the techniques can be initiated from your couch—by using every human being’s ability to utilize the common field in which we all live to transmit and receive information and motivation and to build a reality that others share. In these pages are the compiled experiences of what works. Many of these practices will not fit into your concept of reality. Try them first, and then judge for yourself. Good scientists are always skeptics, but they do not allow their skepticism to keep them from committing 100 percent to a hypothesis. Commit yourself 100 percent for the length of a single exercise, and then, like a good scientist, document everything. You will be astounded by the results that you are able to create.

Living as we do in a culture of “experts,” my greatest pleasure is to make you become your own best expert. In doing so, you also become an expert for your families, friends, companies, and culture. Pardon the cliché, but together, we really can create a better world. This world really, truly starts from your personal and individual experience—your very own power and ability to create the world that you want. When you know how easy it is to create this unique world, what is born is not insatiable desire, but rather unstoppable generosity.

I am an introvert. Although I have now, after fifty years of life, trained myself to look comfortable and animated in public, I am my happiest and most productive on my couch, surrounded by my life and loved ones, where, in my own domain of peace, I can direct my intuitive ability to create and direct the changes that I want, as well as attract the things/people/experiences I want without having to go out into the world. I am now thankful to be gifted in skills that allow me to have a full life, replete with friends, love, work, and entertainment, which is all made possible, for the most part, right from my couch. Now I pass down these skills to you.

In my first book, Practical Intuition, I presented practical techniques to help readers develop their intuitive abilities. In my next two books, Practical Intuition for Success and Practical Intuition in Love, I showed readers how to apply these techniques in their professional and romantic lives, while developing a variety of advanced intuitive skills such as telepathy and precognition. In How to Rule the World from Your Couch, I introduce and explain the various levels on which pure intuition can operate and demonstrate how they are always applicable and alive—even when (especially when!) you’re just sitting there.

Let me hit you with something else: Have you ever experienced, in a fully visceral, soul-talking-directly-to-you kind of way, a shockingly clear, unbelievably useful piece of intuitive information, a tiny morsel of data that you simply, for the life of you, could not explain away? Have you ever just known something not just because you knew it, but more because you sensed it? Many of my students and clients (from doctors, engineers, and market analysts to businesspeople of all varieties, scientists, lawyers, and beyond) have come to their own sense of intuition just this way—through some unexplainable flash of insight, or perhaps triggered by something I said that worked for them. Regardless of how or under what circumstances it occurs, when tapped into purely, intuition and insight become the breath of life. My clients may have been skeptical, but as pragmatists, they knew they could not ignore what they themselves had experienced firsthand. I believe that intuitively they knew they had tapped into a new way of navigating. This sense made them hungry to know more and perhaps even led them to me. Though they may still be skeptics, guess what: they use these skills regularly anyway.

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military sage, said, “Every battle is won before it is ever fought”—and this wise and profound message is exactly what this book is about. Engaging in battle is a waste of time. Goals can be achieved and, in fact, are achieved effectively only when you use your intuition to map the way before you start the journey, anticipating and avoiding obstacles, arriving at landmarks in the right order with proper timing, and, when you can, following the scenic route.

We live in a world of constant activity, always doing, in motion, on task. The reality is that your truest successes come not only from what you do, but more so from your preparedness and ability to gather needed information in advance. The doing piece is actually tiny, but only if you have laid down the proper foundation of readiness. Everything is available. Your only task at hand is to position yourself properly to receive it. Think of yourself as a perfectly designed state-of-the-art radio. You may be able to send and receive all the right signals—but only if your power is on.

Everything you learn in this book will make your decisions better, your relationships stronger, your actions more effective, and your life easier. Each of these abilities can become part and parcel of every decision you make. You will notice that as you hone your intuition, you will be engaged in a lot of inner work. Try to remember that your subconscious can use your intuition to punish you, just as it can attempt to help you. That is why it is so important to be as conscious of your process and motivation as possible, which is why I believe documentation of your work is critical. Remember that you have the ability, through intuition, to know what is coming and how to prepare. Your history, patterns, areas of self-sabotage, reactions, and even your beliefs are what cause you to take the painful path, ignore the obvious, and create bothersome or even disastrous challenges. Think of it this way: even in the most war-torn countries there are people who survive and thrive and help others do the same—and they are the truest intuitives among us.

The goal of this book is to make me, and books like this, obsolete. As you work through each chapter, you will find that your intuition will start to give you a more accurate view of your targets, and you will become a clearer, more powerful, and more direct person. Intuition itself, as I will explain, gives you the power, the questions, and the answers. It gives you the tools to create, to change, and to teach others, as well as the ability to be taught effectively by those around you. The main problem that everyone seems to share is the inability to understand that less work can yield more results. By “work,” I mean the energy that we expend on the wrong things, creating the layers of complexity that we (as human beings with elaborate psyches) tend to (unconsciously) add to the different scenarios in our lives. Think about it: how can adding complexity to a situation possibly be effective? For this reason, I don’t advocate the “no pain no gain” philosophy of life. Pain consumes time, energy, resources, and attention. I hope for you to be able to refine your intuition to simplify, enrich, and energize your life, so that reaching your goals becomes an organic part of living every day.

The problem is that we are not even conscious half the time that we are adding complexity to our lives, but as you will see, by learning to access our intuition we can start to clear the fog of these self-imposed challenges. In this way, we can learn to simplify the complex in order to find the shortest or most pleasurable line between you and your goals—whatever they may be.

Intuition, you see, is innate. It is part of our human hard-wiring, to the point that two-year-olds rely on it to survive and accomplish incredible things, mostly because they do not yet have access to things like intellect, wisdom, or experience. Intuition is so simple that if you merely do the exercises at the beginning of each chapter (even without first reading the chapter), over time, through firsthand experience your intuition will start to fill in some of the blanks. I, as your guide through this process, have created and organized a program of experiences and tools in the form of the book’s chapters to speed up your subconscious process—but it is for the sole purpose of helping you to access and allow your intuition to take over. You will see that as you start to let go of the thinking, and actually start intuiting, you will have more time, energy, and wherewithal to really enjoy this process and your life by easily creating success.

The process, in theory, is very straightforward and will be laid out at the beginning of each chapter. The real challenge will be to apply these techniques efficiently to your life, simply because you are complex and the world is complex, and because what you potentially are able to do and what your beliefs, patterns, and subconscious will allow you to do are two markedly different things. Part of the work of this book will be to give you a direct experience of intuition in a way that has a verifiable and palpable effect on your life. It will do so by helping you to ask the right questions and by engaging you in effective practices that will help to bring these simple, innate abilities to life. To your life.

My goal is that the advice written in this book will prove itself to you, once applied. I’ll give you an example: the best first-time student I ever had told me that he didn’t believe in intuition. He attended my workshop as a favor to his wife and scared himself silly when, within thirty minutes, he got detailed, accurate information about someone he had never met just from holding the person’s name in a blank, sealed envelope.

If I can leave my students with any bottom line, it is this: do not complicate intuition. Just practice accessing it, document the process, and it will do the rest. Don’t worry about doing it right. There is no right. I will start off with broad and somewhat non-linear abstract exercises at the beginning of each chapter, and we will get more detailed as the chapter progresses. You may even find that my details are unnecessary. You will see that if you keep working through the exercises in each chapter, you will quite naturally find your own way.

Typically, self-help authors have insight because they were forced to find it to survive. Survival is a powerful motivator. I remember being nine years old; my parents had separated and my mother was lying in a coma in a hospital. I was not allowed into intensive care. Unbelievable as it may seem, my father was not notified for days and my grandmother, who couldn’t bear the public hospital, had gone home. I was essentially alone, sitting outside intensive care, treating the indigents to coffee and snacks from a vending machine to keep myself distracted.

I “communicated” with my mother the only way that I could: I sent her my energy in the form of breath, thoughts, feelings, pictures, and memories—and in this way brought her back to me. I could tell her that I needed her with all of my senses, pleading with her to live. As I did this I could experience her body. I could feel my attention doing things inside her to fix her. Some of what I “saw” confused me. There was a hole in her neck, tubes coming out of her arms, and bed sores forming on her bottom, shoulders, and legs. I hadn’t actually seen my mother or received any information about her other than the fact that she was in intensive care; however, in some effortlessly concrete manner, deep inside me, I somehow knew that these were her circumstances and saw the full reality of what that could mean.

Someone noticed me wandering around the halls and sent a chaplain over to speak with me. I didn’t want to hear what I knew he was going to say. He began, “Your mother’s brain is badly damaged and it is unlikely that she will ever wake up. If she does wake up she won’t ever be the person you knew again.” To get him to stop speaking so I could keep from crying I asked him questions about facts I “saw.” I asked him about the tubes, the sores, and the machines I had seen in my mind’s eye. He answered me calmly, and then he looked at me and said that it was unfair to me that they had let me into the intensive care ward. I corrected him and explained that I had not been in the ICU. He asked me how I saw all of these things if I hadn’t been in there. I didn’t know how to answer him; I only knew that my intuition had been right.

I also felt and heard her and her future. I knew that this time, she would live and fully recover (as she did), but also that I wouldn’t have her forever. Did I have the emotional maturity to understand all of this information? No. But whatever I did understand intuitively helped me to help her survive and gave me enough information to prepare for her suicide a few years later (fortunately, I didn’t get the whole picture, which would have devastated me). I spent the next few years filling myself up with her and treasuring every moment. I also spent the next few years with my “sight” so closely upon her that my intuition became sharper and more accurate (how she was, what she was doing, what I could do to make it easier). The day she died she was in Kansas (with her parents after my parents’ divorce), and I was in Philadelphia with a friend at a table tennis tournament. As a child I didn’t have enough information to know to call the police there, in an unfamiliar city, as I would have done in New York when I felt something bad happening to her. I called my relatives in the area (from a pay phone, using all the money I had on me) and no one was home. I was extremely anxious that whole afternoon, and when I returned home to New York that night my father told me that my mother was dead.

Now, did my intuition tell me that my mother was dying? No. That would have been too much information for my subconscious to handle. My intuition told me something might be ...