I’m a passionate rain lover. I’m okay with the rest of nature’s weather buffet too, but my favorite part of it is rain. So I was excited when we got our first all-day, steady rain and wind after having two months of dry weather.
Monday morning, Ducky and I headed to the beach to have an invigorating walk in the elements. It felt awesome! What a rush! The feel of the cold sheets of water on my skin, the musky scent, the relentless and energizing rhythm—walking in the rain on the beach is a 100 times better than coffee for an early morning kick start.
So there I was on the beach in the blustery wetness, and I suddenly felt inspired to invoke the power of the rain. (more…)
When a whole lot of yucky things are going on in your life and you’ve sunk to the bottom of the emotional scale and you know you’re out of alignment with what you want, what can you do to feel better right this minute?
Abraham-Hicks teaches many processes that can help improve your emotional set point and thus your alignment, but sometimes things can get so overwhelming that it’s tough to summon up the oomph to do any of the processes. Sometimes, visualizing and journaling and whatever else is just too much trouble. And remember, if it doesn’t feel good, it’s not helping.
A few days ago, Tim and I met with an attorney and provided him with all the paperwork and information he needs to prepare to file my Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Before that appointment, I had about three weeks to get used to the idea that last year at this time, I thought I had more than $50,000 in the bank and no balances running on my credit cards and now here I am filing bankruptcy because of something dumb that my own husband did, something that ran up all my cards and ran down the bank account.
I realize now that I’ve spent the last ten months in shock. When you think you’re trucking along doing just fine and then you get gobsmacked with a “what is” reality that seems to have erupted from the ground beneath your feet like a malevolent alien, shock is a reasonable response, for sure. But it’s not all that helpful to stay stuck in shock for a long time. Shock isn’t exactly a positive vibration. (more…)
Many years ago, I dated a man who was chronically late. And I don’t mean just a little late. He lived in Seattle, and when he’d come to my home for a visit, he usually arrived one to two hours later than he said he would.
I wasn’t all that pleased about this, and I told him so. I was especially annoyed when he offered up excuses like, “I had to clean my vegetable bin before I left.”
In response to my displeasure, my soon to be ex-boyfriend, gave me the book, Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, by Richard Carlson. Over 100 weeks on the bestseller’s list, this little volume was full of great, down-to-earth advice on how to let go of the little stresses of life, but it didn’t make me feel any better about my boyfriend’s tardiness.
The message I got from the book and from my boyfriend was, “Don’t do anything about the little annoyances of life. The small stuff doesn’t matter.”
In some respects, this is a good message, one that helps with alignment. Certainly, complaining and noticing all the little things that are “wrong” in the world don’t activate a vibration that draws wonderful experiences into our lives. But making ourselves be okay with all the little stuff that we don’t like isn’t the way to go about aligning. It’s the smiley face vs. the rodeo clown. Trying to convince yourself that you feel good about something you don’t feel good about is a waste of time. (more…)
Instant manifestation. We all want it, but if we give it any intelligent thought, we know it’s generally a bad idea.
Whenever I think of instant manifestation, I remember one of the original Star Trek episodes in which the crew took shore leave on a planet where whatever they thought about happened. Some of the thoughts ended up having deadly results. With no buffer of time between thought and result, we can create quite a mess.
Still ….. instant manifestation. You want it. You get it. If we could be deliberate about our desires, instant manifestation could be pretty cool.
I know this. Because I experienced it on Sunday. (more…)
When your “what is” story is the kind of ugly story that creates terror and panic, how do find a vibrational match to what you desire?
This is a question I asked up over and over until a few weeks ago, and it’s a question readers have asked me in a different form recently: How do you eliminate the fear?
Yesterday, I set my intention: Wanted: One Fat Focus.
Since then, I’ve been thinking more about how to get it. How do I consistently create that mass of little appreciations that becomes so big and heavy it keeps my teeter-totter from moving as much?
Watching Ducky perform one of her tricks, I got the answer.
Last Friday evening, we had dinner with friends, Neil and Nancy. Ducky was invited too, and she did a couple of her tricks for them. Nancy particularly liked Ducky’s “touch it” trick. She asked, “How did you teach her to do that?”
Though it’s not a complicated trick, it is a bit of a challenge to teach to an enthusiastic puppy obsessed with food. Teaching Ducky this and other tricks requires a lot of repetition, and that, I concluded last night, is the secret to building up the heavy mass of appreciation.
When I taught Ducky to “touch it,” I started by teaching her the foundations that lead to it. I taught her “sit,” then “down,” then “stay.” With each of these commands, I used a treat to move her into the position I wanted her to be in, and once she got there, I gave her praise and the treat.
With stay, I held her in place at first then allowed her to sit or lie on her own. When I said, “stay” and she moved, I put her back in place and repeated the command. If she didn’t move, I said, “good stay,” and gave her a treat.
Once I had these in place, I started working on “touch it.” I put the treat in front of her and said stay. I said “touch it” as I picked up her paw and put it on the treat. Then I said, “Good touch it.”
We did this multiple times a day for several days, and then one day, I said, “touch it,” and she did. Once dogs learns a trick, the trick becomes second nature to them. These days, when we get out a treat, Ducky sometimes dances (on her hind legs—spinning in a circle), waves with her paw, and rolls over before you say a word.
So how do we translate this into training minds?
Deliberate Thought Training 101
Based on my ongoing success with Ducky, I’ve come up with a training program for my puppy-like brain.
It’s a four step process for teaching the brain to “like it.”
What I’m aiming for with this process is having a brain that automatically looks for something to like about every little thing I see or experience. I want my thoughts to “dance” without needing a command and “roll over” away from negative judgments and focus.
I want all this to be second-nature, done without effort the way Ducky does her tricks these days. Before I can get there, though, I need some training.
1. I figured I needed to start with a foundation. Getting to “like it” from a place of mindlessly observing what is would be like asking an untrained dog who doesn’t know how to sit or stay to “touch it.”
So the way I’m doing this is to teach myself to “sit and stay on appreciation.” I constantly put myself in the position of appreciation by saying over and over in my head, “I appreciate …. ” Then I fill in with something after that.
This isn’t as obtrusive as it sounds. I’ve found in the few hours I’ve been practicing this that I can repeat this while I work, eat, and have conversations.
2. Now that I’ve gotten a foundation, I’m moving on to putting myself in a position to “like it.” I pretend to have the mindset of an eager pup, expecting everything to be a toy, sure that the whole world is there to amuse me. With this perspective, how can I dislike anything?
If I move out of this position, I put myself back in it with an anchor. An anchor is a neurolinguistic programming (NLP) technique. It’s a physical gesture linked to a specific thought or feeling response. Many anchors are unconscious, and in fact, they become unwanted habits—like chewing on nails when anxious or needing a cigarette to concentrate. You can create anchors on purpose, though. The way to do it is to elicit the desired state, which can be done with visualization, then make the gesture while in that state.
I created my anchor by using my favorite state of appreciation—watching Ducky do something cute. While I watched her, I put my thumb up and waggled it back and forth (a cross between thumbs up and wags).
My anchor is working pretty well so far. When I shift from the eager place of “the world is a cool place,” I waggle my thumb, and I am right back in position again.
3. Now that I have my foundation and my anchor (the equivalent of me putting Ducky’s paw on the treat), I keep repeating my “command:” “I like.” Then I smile. That’s my reward.
4. And as with training a puppy, I am doing all of this over and over and over and over again.
I’ve just begun this training process so I’ll have to let you know its long-term impact. For now, though, in less than a day, I’ve seen a marked reduction in the up-down of my mental teeter-totter. Apparently, I’m trainable, because this seems to be working.
You don’t need to follow my method for getting that teeter-totter to stop popping up and down. Greg commented, after yesterday’s post, that he’s using a virtual hug and self love to weigh down the other end of the teeter-totter. Karen uses her thought clicker (one is on its way to me too, and I’m sure it will help). Whatever works!
The great thing is that as soon as you make the effort to get that teeter-totter stable, the law of attraction will bring you thoughts that match your new thought vibration. It gets easier and easier.
Have you found a way to still your thought teeter-totter? Please share it so others can give it a try too.
I love comments and welcome yours. To leave a comment, click on the “comments” link (it will say “No comments or “1 comment” or more) at the end of the tags in “Posted in” at the end of this post.
Tim and I have made a pact. For one week, starting today, we are not going to complain about anything, not one single solitary tiny thing. Not out loud and not in our heads.
Complaints are, of course, negative energy. Complaints aren’t vibrationally aligned with anything we really want.
Abraham-Hicks says:
“You have in your vibrational escrow all those things you want, and you could pick any one thing on the planet that’s going wrong or in your life and give it your undivided attention, and you could keep all of those things that you want from happening because you’ve activated such a vibration of lack over this one thing. Isn’t that interesting? Because whatever it is that you use as your excuse to offer your vibration, sets the tone for your point of attraction.
“Haven’t you noticed that the the worse it gets, the worse it gets for awhile, until you come to your senses? And the better it gets, the better it gets, until you fall back into your old habits? In other words, haven’t you noticed that you can get on a run where you’re feeling really good and things just get better and better and better and then some old person shows up in your life or something happens and you get re-focused or you watch CNN or you go to the movie on Global Warming and you have sort of a Resistance Relapse?”
In other words, every time we turn our attention to complaining, we activate resistance that keeps us from moving toward what we desire.
But we spend a lot of time complaining … about really silly stuff, generally.
I find it funny, actually, how someone like me and others I know can talk about the law of attraction and how like attracts like and how we create our reality and then two seconds later complain about something.
It’s like my friend and I are looking at a fire. I say, “If I stick my hand in that fire, I will burn my skin, and it will hurt.” My friend nods sagely and says, “That is so true. We must keep our hands out of the fire.” Then we both put our hands in the fire.
Well, this week, my hands are staying out of the fire.
Complaints don’t serve me. If I see something I don’t like, I will use the contrast to help me determine what I do like. Then I’ll think about and talk about what I like.
If others are complaining, I am no longer going to stick to the social convention of, “Oh, yes, I know what you mean,” which is generally followed by another story of complaint.
I will listen and then find a positive aspect and mention that.
So if you are someone who plans to talk to me this week or communicate with me this week, be forewarned. I’m off the complain-chain.
This is the week for comMENDing, not comPLAINing.
Let’s applaud life instead of jeering at it.
Want to join me in a complain-free week? Leave a comment and state your intention to join us in our pact. Let’s see what we can create together by commending instead of complaining.
Calvin Coolidge said, “If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.”
For the last several months, I’ve been staring down the road at a whole passel of financial troubles. These troubles are HUGE and UGLY and TERRIFYING and they have nasty names like Run Out Of Money and Lose My House and Get A Job I Hate.
These troubles put off a stink that makes me feel nauseated. They suck oxygen from the air so it’s hard for me to breathe. They make such a racket, a cacophony of blackboard scratching type sounds in my head, that I find it hard to focus on anything else.
But these troubles are DOWN THE ROAD. They’re not here, not right in front of me.
But I’ve been calling them to me. I’ve been whistling at them with my thoughts. Every time I focus on them, I’m tossing a rope down the road, lassoing those nasty troubles and yanking them toward me.
Why would I want to do that?
I don’t. So I’m stopping.
In the last couple days of finding things that are good in my now, I’ve noticed that where I’m standing on the road TODAY is pretty nice. This spot in the road has lovely trees that sway in the breeze. It’s touched by gentle sunshine and sprinkled with fresh rain. It’s a spot where my dog, Ducky, can play with her toys, and my husband can tell me he loves me. It’s a place where I can have a glass of red wine by the fire, a place where I can laugh, and I place where I can be intrigued and inspired.
I’ve noticed that when I look at where I am today, I don’t notice the troubles. No nasty smell. No oxygen depletion. No sound in my head.
Making feeling good my #1 priority has changed my life! I now have a new site, Up From Splat. Come visit me at Up From Splat and get ongoing inspiration, encouragement, and resources to help you align with all your desires!!
Monday, the rain came back. Hurray!
Many years ago, I dated a man who was chronically late. And I don’t mean just a little late. He lived in Seattle, and when he’d come to my home for a visit, he usually arrived one to two hours later than he said he would.
