NL: Hi everyone! My name is Natalie Ledwell and this is the Inspiration Show. Today on the show I have a very good friend of mine who is going to be talking to us about a book that she is helping to distribute and promote at the moment that it’s written by her sister and it’s quite the story.  Before I actually divulge who this is and this amazing story about how this book came to be I just want to remind you that if you are watching this show on Facebook live or if you’re watching on our YouTube afterwards, don’t forget to click the link below this video after the show is over so you can take my 30-second quiz, so we can figure out what is holding you back from success. Okay, so let me introduce my special guest and good friend Arielle Ford. Hi Arielle, how are you?

AF:  I’m great Natalie. How are you?

NL: I am fantastic! Now today we’re gonna be talking about a new book that’s just coming out now. It’s called Your Holiness – Discover The Light Within. It is written by your sister Debbie Ford and some people may remember Debbie from Oprah shows and she was on several different shows and had movies and so forth. Well the interesting thing about this story is that Debbie actually passed away five years ago. So why don’t we start first of all with like, how did this happen, like why is this just coming

AF: I know, I know. It’s totally crazy. Well what happened was a little more than a year ago James Van Praagh gave me a call to tell me he’d actually moved to San Diego and for the three people watching who don’t know who James Van Praagh is, he is the world’s greatest medium, the person who’s known the best for talking to dead people. The movie “The Sixth Sense” was about his life. The TV show “The Ghost Whisperer” was about his life and he’s just absolutely fabulous and Natalie I know you know him. And so he said, “Well I’ve moved to San Diego why don’t you and Brian and your mom come visit me come see my new house and while you’re here I’ll give you a reading with Debbie.” Because he and Debbie were also very close and of course we said no. No we don’t want to talk to Debbie. Yeah well we got up there so fast. So he gives us a tour of his fantastic property and then we sit down in his office for the reading and Debbie comes through instantly and the very first thing she says is “Arielle you have to write a prayer book with me” and I was like no way Debbie, I don’t want to write my own books, let alone try and figure out how to write your books. There’s no way I’m doing this. And she kept asking and I kept saying no and in between, you know, my two fathers came through, Bryan’s parents came through, lots of dead relatives are popping in to say hi. You know one point James says to me who’s Minnie? She keeps talking to me about Minnie and I said well nobody knows this. You can’t even google it but Bo, Debbie’s son, has a half-sister named Minnie and that’s not even a real name, that’s just what we call her. He said okay that makes sense. Debbie says tell Bo that when he was with Minnie she was with them and I said oh that’s so crazy. Minnie lives in London, Bo lives in San Diego but Minnie came to visit a few weeks before so I’m thinking you know, he’s so spot on. It’s so crazy. So the reading goes on and on and on and on and then Debbie doesn’t stop, “You’ve got to write a prayer book, you got to write a prayer book.” Finally I said yes because I knew she wasn’t gonna stop and I said to James I don’t know how we’re gonna do this cause you’re gonna have to be part of it. You know I’m not a channel. So we leave James and then we start driving home on the freeway and Brian says “You know all those many hours I spent with your sister taking her to chemo, taking her to doctor’s appointments, I remember that she told me she loved to write prayers. Why don’t you call Julie the woman who runs her business and see maybe she has some of them, that would be the start of the book.” So I get home. I send Julie like a one-sentence email, do you by chance have copies of any prayers Debbie wrote? And she writes me back and says I can do better than that. She wrote an entire book, I’ve attached it. So I open up this PDF it’s 200 pages, totally edited, a complete book, it’s breathtakingly beautiful and I’m thinking to myself I was her literary agent. How is it possible that I didn’t know she wrote this book? And when I thought about it, you know, the last year of her life, we didn’t talk about books, we talked about her pain levels and experimental treatments and miracles, but not books. So I pick up the phone to call her editor at Harper One and I say, “Hey Gideon, it’s Arielle. I want to talk to you about my sister and prayer” and he stops me and he says. “Oh my God for the last three years I’ve been feeling so guilty. Your sister always wanted to write a prayer book and I always talked her out of it and I feel so bad.” And I said, “Well you don’t have to feel bad anymore, check your inbox, I just sent you the book.” And of course the next week they bought it and now on March 6, Your Holiness is coming out and it’s book number 10 and it’s absolutely brilliant and if it weren’t for the completely amazing, utterly fantastic James Van Praagh, we wouldn’t know about this book.

NL: I know, isn't it amazing. And there are so many serendipitous things that happen in that story that you’re just like okay, well this was obviously meant to be.

AF: It was magic. It was really magic.

NL: So for those people who maybe aren’t familiar with Debbie, tell us a little bit about her life and her work and what she was doing.

AF:   So Debbie was what I call the most successful drug addict that ever lived. You know she had a 12-year long addiction with all kinds of drugs and while she was doing that she was a very successful entrepreneur. She had five women’s retail shops, her own line of clothing. She drove a beautiful Porsche convertible, lived in a high-rise overlooking Miami Beach, had people following her everywhere she went and then one day after her third treatment center failed, she went back to drugs and then she woke up one day and realized that she was gonna die. If she didn't go back to the treatment she would die. In her fourth treatment center, on her 10^th day she was getting ready to run. She was getting ready to go find drugs as fast as possible but instead she went to the bathroom and she got on her hands and knees on this dirty bathroom floor and just prayed and prayed and prayed and she had this spiritual awakening and she realized that if she would pray every day and if she would connect to the divine part of herself that she could do it one day at a time. And that was sort of the start of the story because she did recover from drug addiction and that led her to go back to college and get a degree in transpersonal psychology where she was introduced to the concept of the shadow by Carl Jung. And decided to synthesize everything she learned about the shadow and personal growth into something she calls the shadow process. So she went on to become a number one New York Times Best Selling author of many books including “The Dark Side of the Light Chasers.” As you mentioned, Oprah had her on many times and then unfortunately, you know, she got this very rare cancer for which there was no cure and in spite of that lived two and a half years longer than they said she could and she left this earth really five years ago this week.

NL: Wow. So what are the prayers for?

AF: So it’s really interesting. So the book is a very prescriptive book. So it’s filled with a lot of her original prayers as well as prayers by Emmet Fox and Marianne Williamson but it also has, in every chapter, prescriptions on how to connect to your Divine self, how to be more effective in the world, how to love yourself, how to live with more integrity. And it’s really her whole process for staying sober for probably close to 25 years, after she had that one experience. So it’s a very accessible book, it’s for anybody interested in spirituality, personal growth and I would say most importantly, anybody who has any form of hard or soft addiction, that’s really struggling with something, and I would say that’s most of us, because even if you don’t have a drug or alcohol addiction you know people have all kinds of soft addictions. You know even if it’s just a Facebook, right?

NL: Exactly. Or even if it’s you find yourself sitting in front of the TV every night when you know your intention is that you want to be doing something positive. You want to be exercising but you always find yourself in front of the TV. It can be any of those kinds of things.

AF:  Yeah, it's a very coated book and I asked Julie, I said when did she write this book, you know. When did she have time and she went a couple of years before the cancer came, she was going through a very difficult relationship break up and she said that every morning she would go down to her office and get on her hands and knees and she started praying again and the messages that she was getting from, whether it was God, God his higher self, who knows, came in the form of prayers and she started writing them. And then the reason I didn’t know about the book was she told Gideon, her editor about it and he said no I don’t want it, so she didn’t bother telling me about it. Now five years later obviously she’s ready for the whole world to have this book.

NL: Right. So how do we use the book, like do we just read the prayers? Like how do we do a prayer?

AF: Well I’ve been doing it a couple of different ways. And the prayers are kind of short you know, they're not very long. So sometime after I read the book, three times now, I just sort of think about something that's on my mind and I'll randomly open a page and so I open to self – forgiveness. You know and I'll just read one prayer. None of the prayers are more than two pages and most of them are half a page. So it's really, a really sweet, easy-to-use book and as I said, I think anybody who has any level of self-doubt or self-loathing or is dealing with an issue they can’t find an answer to, this book would really help.

NL: So that’s basically the entire human race, okay.

AF: When I think about well, who wouldn’t want this book? Before I would say anybody that’s, you know, a hardcore you know fundamentalist evangelical kind of person that would think how the book came to be was the work of the devil. They probably wouldn’t appreciate the book, but for all the people we know, I think they’d love it.

NL: Yeah, I'm sure they would. So did any power of prayers come through from Debbie from the other side that is included in the book?

AF: You know that’s a great question. No, we haven’t really asked her for that. But what we did do, was I interviewed Debbie about the book through James last week.  Half-hour video interview which we're giving away to anybody who buys the book. They will get that interview with her as a bonus. Because I asked her things like what have you learned about prayers since she got to the other side? What have you learned about what love is and isn’t? What have you learned about forgiveness because she talked about the importance of forgiveness in this interview and really letting go of judgment. That judgment is one of the toxic poisons that really harms us. So it was a very high level intellectual conversation that I didn’t expect because you know if you watch the Long Island medium, the answers are always the same. Oh your departed mother’s with you and she loves you and she’s always there for you. It was not that kind of an interview. It was pure Debbie coming through James.

NL: Wow! That must have been absolutely mind-blowing. Because you know, I've seen the mediums on stage and it's like, you know, someone in the red shirt with the... so it is, you’re right. It’s always very simple conversations and simple messages so they’re coming through but the fact that you had the ability and the opportunity to be able to do that with Debbie is just incredible.

AF: Yeah, it’s just sort of like you know, well you know, people are gonna have to interview me because she’s not here and then I heard her say in my ear what do you mean I’m not there, just get James. That’s like, that’s right. She’s available to be interviewed if you have the right receptacle.

NL: Yeah, absolutely. That’s so cool. So is there any of your favorites, can you share one maybe one of the favorite prayers that you have in the book?

AF: You know I’ll share Debbie’s favorite, how’s that?

NL: That’s great.

AF: I thought it’s called “Drenched in Holiness” and let me find it for you, because it’s right at the beginning of the book. So I wrote the foreword to the book and Marianne Williamson wrote the introduction and then everybody else we know endorsed it. Okay,

Drenched in Holiness

Dear God,

On this day I ask you to grant this request.

May I know who I am and

what I am every moment of every day.

May I be a catalyst for light and love

and bring inspiration to those whose eyes I meet.

May I have the strength to stand tall in the face of conflict

and the courage to speak my voice even when I’m scared.

May I have the humility to follow my heart

and the passion to live my soul’s desires.

May I seek to know the highest truth

and dismiss the gravitational pull of my lower self.

May I embrace and love the totality of myself,

my darkness as well as my light.

May I be brave enough to hear my heart, to let it soften

so that I may gracefully choose faith over fear.

Today is my day to surrender anything that stands between

the sacredness of my humanity and my divinity.

That’s drenched in…

NL: Stunning, absolutely stunning.

AF: Yeah, so you know I’m just hoping we can get the word out there, reach the world. Let people know that Debbie is accessible, that anybody to anybody that asks for her help and I get calls and emails from people all the time saying you know I never met your sister I read this book and I had a thought the other day, what would Debbie Ford say to do and then she spoke to me and this is happening all the time. So it’s remarkable to know that while on the physical plane she’s not here, on the multi-dimensional unseen planes she seems to be everywhere.

NL: Yeah, of course. Arielle thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing this. I can’t wait to get my hands on the book because I could see it would be something that every day you could just have a thought in your mind open it to a page and then have a prayer that would be fantastic. So where can we send people to connect with you and to get their hands on the book?

AF: Okay all the information on the book and the bonuses will be at Debbieford.com. Really easy, Debbieford.com and of course the book’s available with booksellers online and I’m super easy to find, I’m at soulmatesecret.com

NL: All right. Perfect. Darling again, thanks for joining me today.

AF: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

NL: Yeah and guys if you’re watching this video I encourage you to share it. Please share it by using the Facebook and the Twitter share buttons on this page. And don’t forget there’ll be a link underneath here or a banner to the side where you can go directly through to Debbie's website so you can get your hands on the book. And again don’t forget after the show is over to take my 30-second quiz so we can figure out what’s holding you back from success. So until next time, remember to live large, choose courageously and love without limits. Thanks guys, we’ll see you soon.