I’ve been trying to find my way through the nonphysical aspects of life for over 40 years, maybe for even longer. My father used to tell me that when I was two years old, I would stare off into space with such a pensive expression that he was sure I was contemplating the meaning of life.
I entered college with the intention of taking pre-law courses—government, economics etc. I was bored out of my mind by the end of my first semester, and I ended up spending the rest of my college years immersed in psychology, philosophy, and religion. I still landed in law school, but the reasons for that is another story.
About a dozen years ago, I thought I’d figured out one important aspect of being a physical body in a world ordered by nonphysical energy that I still didn’t understand. I thought I could find my way through life by following my intuition in conjunction with sychronicities and signs. (more…)
Last week, in Two Steps To Great Decisions, I wrote about using the path of least resistance to make decisions. The two-step process I outlined really does work to help you make an aligned decision.
Sometimes, though, it’s not quite enough. Some decisions don’t easily suggest a path of least resistance. I recently faced such a decision, and I discovered a way to find that path.
In case you don’t remember the steps, here they are:
Step One—Take The Path of Least Resistance. To find the path of least resistance, (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…)
When I was in high school, I let a friend of mine talk me into watching Night of the Living Dead with her. Images of relentless zombies assaulted me off and on for years afterwards. Thanks, Mel.
Lately, I’ve been receiving Facebook page invites, Twitter messages, and e-mails that remind me a little of those undead drones. Instead of Night of the Living Dead, it’s Weeks of the Hypnotists.
It’s my own fault. A couple months ago, out of curiosity and not awareness of my alignment, I read a sales page about hypnosis audios. The seller of the audios claimed that the audios would get your subconscious on board with a money mindset.
The seller was adamant that the reason law of attraction doesn’t seem to have a positive impact for most of us is that our subconscious minds are off chewing on all kinds of negative beliefs even while our conscious minds are focusing on what we desire. I guess all that negative belief digestion causes a sort of energetic heartburn or gas that prevents vibrational alignment with desires. (more…)
Last week, Tim and I finished updating the Novel Writing Made Easy System, my e-book/audio package. We finished our “product test”—asking for feedback, I’d sent the updates to people who had bought the original version of the package. The great testimonials I received in response went onto the sales page.
Although we’re still working on Facebook pages and I have many promotional articles to write, the bulk of the project is complete.
And yesterday, I felt lousy.
Say what?
Why did I feel bad when I could have been exulting over a job well done?
Two things happened:
One of the writing groups I belong to on LinkedIn sent its weekly update of postings. I’ve yet to post in any of the LinkedIn groups because I only finished semi-completing my profile last week, but I glanced at others’ posts. One of the posts was a writer’s complaint that she’s set up Facebook Fan Pages but has received few fans. How can she get people to notice her, she asked.
Instantaneously, I felt my energy plummet. I became tense.
I’m aware enough of my emotional guidance system that I knew I’d just had a thought that didn’t align with my nonphysical being, and I knew what the thought was: “This writer is right—it’s SO difficult to get people to notice you. As usual, I’m one tiny whisper in a sea of screaming voices. What made me thing my information would be noticed any more than anyone else’s?”
Not the most empowering thought, I know. No wonder my nonphysical self didn’t agree with it.
Of course, the law of attraction was, as always, on duty. So even though I was aware of the negativity of my thought, I’d chewed on it long enough for the law of attraction to do its work.
Law of attraction brought me the second thing that set off my lousy mood. I checked our Pay Pal and Clickbank accounts, and in the three days the sales page has been up, we’ve had no sales.
Yes, I know. Three days isn’t a long time. But this is a sales page that has been up, in its previous form, for years. We usually get a sale every other day or so at least. I decided this was a bad omen.
And of course as soon as I decided that, my emotional guidance system went off again. I felt even worse. This time, I was close to tears.
I started hooking into my old failure story: I finish a project, and it doesn’t bring me the results I want.
No wonder that by the end of the day, I felt awful. Instead of staying on the road of triumph in my completed project, I had set off down the road of doubt.
Doubt Is A Hardy Seed
In her book, One Day My Soul Just Opened Up, Author Iyanla Vanzant, writes:
“Doubt is bred in the mental state of attachment or emotional investment in the outcome. When we have a fixed idea of how things should be and how we want them to look, we become doubtful that we will get what we want.”
Doubt works like this: We focus on something we desire. At first, we may do so with joyful intent, and in that joyful intent, we take inspired action. We have enthusiasm for the doing. This is where I’ve been for the last month or so. I’ve been in a state of exhilarated focus on my project.
At some point, though, most of us start to evaluate our progress. I definitely do this. We look for some specific evidence we think signifies that we’re on the right track. We believe that if we see this evidence, it means it’s all going to work out the way we want it to. If we don’t see this evidence (as I haven’t in the last couple days), we begin to doubt the result. “The moment a seed of doubt becomes imbedded in our thoughts,” Vanzant says, “we can become so preoccupied with fixing what has apparently gone wrong that our thoughts shift from the desired outcome.”
In other words, we begin thinking about the lack of what we want. And good old law of attraction keeps on doing its work: As Abraham-Hicks says,
“The thought that you think, you think, which attracts to it; so you think it some more, which attracts to it; so you think it some more. In other words, when you have an expectation, you’ve got a dominant thought going on, and Law of Attraction is going to deliver that to you again, and again and again. And you say ‘The reason that I believe this, is because it is true.’ And we say, the reason that you believe it, is because you’ve practiced the thought. All that a belief is, is a thought that you keep practicing.”
Obviously, continuing to feel lousy isn’t helping me attract anything good, so I set about to shift my thought. Doubt wasn’t a seed I wanted to nurture. I needed to plant a different one.
Enjoyment Is A Beautiful Seed
My shift away from doubt was weak at the beginning. I tried a few thought replacements that didn’t make me feel much better. Finally, though, I reminded myself that it wasn’t up to me to control how anything unfolded. I need to get my attention off what is and put it back on the result I’ve already created in my successful identity.
As soon as I had that thought, the image of a sand mandala popped into my head. Several years ago, I wrote a newspaper column about sand mandalas, but I haven’t thought about them since. As soon as I thought of them, though, I knew why law of attraction had brought me the thought in response to my tentative mental shift.
Sand mandalas are a Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Patient, gifted monks work with colored sand to create colorful, intricate patterns. The monks apply sand granules using tubes, funnels and scrapers until the desire pattern is created. Most sand mandalas take several weeks to build.
Once they’re completed, sand mandalas are ritualistically destroyed. The destruction symbolizes the Buddhist recognition of the transitory nature of material things.
Sand mandalas are a beautiful example of the way to cultivate a different seed, the seed of enjoyment.
Obviously, when monks create sand mandalas, they’re not doing it for an end result. They’re doing it for the process, the satisfaction of the task at hand.
As soon as I thought of sand mandalas, I knew what I must do. I must bring my focus back from any result I want to what’s in front of me now. I can’t let myself think about where I’m going or what obstacles might be between me and where I want to be. I have to be here now where I want to go.
The way to do that is to keep moving, in focused enjoyment.
In the movie, Finding Nemo, Nemo’s dad, Marlin, is discouraged because his search for his son isn’t going the way he wants it to. His new friend, Dory, gives him a pep talk. Her pep talk may seem simplistic, but it sweetly and humorously captures the perfect way to trade doubt seeds for enjoyment seeds:
Unless we want to create dingy, dark, miserable things in our lives, we can’t put our focus on what seems to be going wrong with our efforts. We must keep our attention on what feels good now.
It’s the enjoyment of the process, the positive aspects of what’s in front of us, that allows us to “keep swimming” in a sea of abundance and happiness, that sea where we must remain so law of attraction will bring us abundant and happy experiences.
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“Seeing is a believing.” Most people live by this cliché.
Of course, anyone who understands the law of attraction knows the opposite is true: “Believing is seeing.”
I’ve known for a long time that believing in an outcome is important to achieving the outcome; but in the past, I’ve had trouble developing the beliefs I need to achieve what I want.
Years ago, I attended a week long self-improvement seminar that focused on drilling through your past to find your dominant “story,” the one belief about yourself that impacts everything you do. The belief I found (and it wasn’t difficult—it was lying right on the surface) was “I’m not good enough.”
I’m not going to rehash all the reasons I developed that belief about myself. Why would I want to go back and activate a vibration around all sorts of negative stuff? But that is the belief I carried around for a very, very long time. And it’s a belief that creeps back in from time to time, like the occasional bug that manages to get past an exterminators’ chemicals.
My book shelves used to be stuffed with self-help books designed to help you ferret out your limiting beliefs and patterns. All these books—I’m talking literally hundreds of them—asserted that if you can find your “core beliefs,” your “imprints,” or your “self-repeating patterns” (and other similar catchy names), you can change them and transform your life. Every one of these books was usually full of helpful programs or systems or exercises that were supposed to excavate the crud in your psyche and clean it up.
Before I bought all those books, I paid thousands to a therapist who was supposed to help me do that too. She too had plans and tasks that were supposed to change my old beliefs.
If I were to total up all the hours I’ve spent making lists, writing out old memories, repeating affirmations, doing meditations and visualizations, and journaling about belief systems, they’d probably fill a whole year of my life. And did I ever get rid of my old beliefs?
Some of them, yes.
Am I a transformed person? Somewhat, yes.
Did this process make my life all wonderful?
No.
So what am I going to do with all these beliefs that may still be holding me back?
I’m going to ignore them.
Abraham-Hicks says, “If your desire is strong enough, it doesn’t matter what your beliefs are. If you have a desire that is strong enough, that desire will be the dominant vibration, and it will over-ride any other vibration that you have.”
It doesn’t matter what your beliefs are. Wow. I wish I’d known that before I invested in all that therapy and those books and workshops. But that’s okay. All those experiences provided contrast that showed me what I truly want.
What do I want?
I want to be happy without all kinds of work attached to it.
Self improvement can turn into a job unto itself. I believe we shouldn’t have to work so hard to be okay.
And we don’t have to.
I have finally come to understand that the old beliefs, the old patterns, the old imprints are irrelevant if we follow Abraham-Hicks’ most basic teaching: find reasons to feel good.
You don’t have to go looking for negative beliefs if you’re paying attention to how you feel. If you start feeling bad, you can be pretty sure that some negative belief has erupted from within and is guiding your thoughts. Why bother to drill for the things if they’re going to jump out and wave their arms around right in front of your nose?
Let’s say you have moles in your backyard. You used to drill down into the earth to throw in smoke bombs or poison or bleach or whatever other mole-killing concoction you heard about. Then some very smart person told you about a vibrational sensor you had built into your lawn. This sensor goes off every time a mole is creating another dirt mountain on your grass. All you have to do is go out there and redirect the mole.
Wouldn’t that be handy?
Well, we have such a sensor for our industrious old beliefs and negative thought patterns. Abraham-Hicks calls it our emotional guidance system. It is absolutely fool proof. When we’ve activated a negative belief or thought, we feel bad. All we have to do is find a thought that feels better.
Simple.
Picture that robot in Lost In Space flailing its mechanical arms about: “Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!”
Who needs a drill when you have a helpful robot?
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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!!
I’ve been trying to find my way through the nonphysical aspects of life for over 40 years, maybe for even longer. My father used to tell me that when I was two years old, I would stare off into space with such a pensive expression that he was sure I was contemplating the meaning of life.
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.
