After devoting countless hours to the labor of love that is this blog, I have decided to redirect my energy away from it. Over the last few weeks, I have been maintaining this blog (marginally) along with my new site, Up From Splat, and my other hobby blog, The Joyful Springer. I have come to accept that this is more than I want to do.
Because all of what I write about on Up From Splat is law of attraction based, and much of it focuses on getting easy, the power of the mind, and focus, my efforts there and here are a trifle redundant. I began to realize a couple weeks ago that my posts here felt more like obligation than inspiration.
Unlike this blog, Up From Splat was designed to become an income producing business over time. Even so, I’m committed to providing quality content, and anything that I recommend or sell on the site will be offered as a resource for creating the life you desire.
I thank you for your loyal readership here. I appreciate you! I’d be delighted if you follow me to Up From Splat and subscribe to receive blog updates. I will strive to offer information and ideas that support you in your law of attraction-aware fun life journey.
Yes, I know I keep talking about my dogs. But when you live with a being who spends all day everyday in the Vortex, if you don’t pay attention to her attitudes and actions, you’re just plain dumb. Who wouldn’t want to emulate pure joy? (more…)
For most of this year, I’ve been rudderless. With no way of steering, I’ve manually paddled in one direction then another … my gaze on the horizon, seeking work that feels right and could produce a steady income.
All my paddling, though earnest, has been desultory. That’s not surprising. When you don’t have a destination, you don’t have much incentive to put your back into it.
Who can be productive like this? Not me.
Here’s how I went from drifting aimlessly to gleefully churning through inspired actions that are lighting me up like pulsing neon and how you can do the same (more…)
Last week, I ran into Susie, a fellow regular beachcomber, on one of my walks with my dog, Ducky.
“I haven’t found an agate in weeks and weeks,” Susie said to me. “Have you?”
“No,” I said.
“Where have all the agates gone?” she asked.
I said I didn’t know.
We chatted a bit more and went our separate ways. Not five minutes later, having forgotten all about agates because I was thinking about traveling in a luxury coach with Tim and Ducky and her two Springer sisters, I found an agate. And I found another five minutes after that.
Two agates … and two important things to remember about the law of attraction. (more…)
Think you can’t ignore something that’s right in front of your face? Think again.
Last week, thanks to my reader, Mary, I watched a youtube yoga video that teaches breathing exercises and postures that help with weight loss. Because it felt like inspired action to watch the video and because it felt easy and comfortable to write down the routine and plan to do it, I decided to start a short version of the routine.
One of the exercises in the routine is alternate nostril breathing. This is something I used to do, and whether it helps with weight loss or not, I couldn’t say, but it is calming, and I wanted to get in the habit of doing it again. (more…)
Imagine a cute little toddler who is learning to walk. She’s gotten to a point where she can pull herself upright. She can take herky-jerky steps, those steps that always remind me of the lurching gate of the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. She can careen a few feet before she plops on her adorable tush. She does this over and over, stumbling, tripping, falling, trying again.
Tell me, would you ever, in a million years, consider screaming at this sweet child, “Get up and RUN, damn you!”? Of course not.
But this is what we tend to do to ourselves when we’re learning a new skill.
Living in awareness of the law of attraction, using thought deliberately to align with desires, is a new skill. We weren’t taught how to do this when we were small and eager to learn (at least I wasn’t).
When it comes to focused thought, we are toddlers.
I’d forgotten that, and I was expecting of myself more than I could do.
This last weekend, I embraced my toddlerhood, and I feel so much better.
I live in a coastal tourist town where permanent residences are mixed in with vacation homes and “camping lots,” wooded lots to which people bring their RVs a few times a year. The town isn’t the prettiest ocean-side town in the world; still, it has a sort of comfortable beauty to it, like a favorite sweater that is a little pilled and has a missing button but fits just right. I enjoy the casual hodgepodgy feel of the place.
One of my neighbors, on the other hand, isn’t all that happy with hodgepodge. A couple days ago, she started complaining about a camping lot that’s across the street from her well-maintained, lovely home. Before she could get too far down the negative road, I stopped her and asked, “Is this making you feel good?” (more…)
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.
A few days ago, this Abraham-Hicks quote landed in my e-mail inbox:
“When you’re vibrating purely, you get only what’s a match to that. It’s your ambivalence: ‘I like that but I don’t like that… I like that but I don’t like that..’ that keeps what you like and what you don’t like coming at you all the time. You don’t have to ‘turn the other cheek’ when you are in vibrational harmony only with what you want. Then, only what you want comes.”
This isn’t new information, obviously. I know noticing what I like brings me more of it and noticing what I don’t like brings me more of that. For some reason, though, this statement immediately projected an image of a teeter-totter into my head, and as I moved through my days afterward, I became acutely aware of how my thoughts constantly shifted from likes to don’t likes and how the teeter-totter in my head popped up and down in sync with my shifting thoughts.The graphic visual spotlighted how much my thoughts go up and down, up and down, up and down. Just in the short five-minute drive from our house to the forest where I walk Ducky, for instance, I watched my thoughts do something like this:
The cherry blossoms in that yard are lovely. UP
They need to pull some weeds. DOWN
I’m glad they repaved this road. UP
Why did they leave those pieces of asphalt piled up at the corners? DOWN
That’s where the nice people who own the Mexican restaurant live. UP
They’ve left their garage door open—what a mess they have in there. DOWN
It’s a nice mild day; no rain. UP
The mosquitoes are going to be ferocious on the back trail. DOWN
It’s amazing I’m not in a state of perpetual motion sickness.
I’ve been paying attention to my emotional guidance system to help me monitor my thoughts, and I’ve been doing SO much better than I was even just a couple months ago. No more panic and anxiety. I’ve been feeling good.
But when I started paying attention, I saw how much I focus on things I don’t like. I seem to attach a dislike to every like I come up with.
I’ve even done it with Ducky, my feel good touchstone: Ducky makes me laugh, and she purely delights me, but I sure wish she wouldn’t bring in sticks and tear them into pieces to leave on my rug.
Remember being on a teeter-totter when you were a kid? You needed someone of somewhat equivalent weight on the other side so you could consistently pop up and down.
When I was in grade school, one of my classmates was an extremely fat girl. Most of the kids wouldn’t play with her, so I did. One day, she and I settled onto the teeter-totter, not thinking about how the difference in our weights was going to impact our fun. I was a skinny kid. She was huge. I straddled my end. She got on and sat down. I shot up in the air so fast I nearly fell off.
No matter how hard she tried to push off the ground to pop up in the air herself, she couldn’t do it. I was stuck up in the air until one of my friends came over and hung on to my end to lower it down.
Teeter-Totter Thought
The high end of the teeter-totter is our focus on likes. The things that please us allow us to push off and fly into the air. The things that don’t please us are the push-offs on the other end of the teeter-totter that send us back to earth. Most of us have as many dislikes as we have likes, so the balance of our thought is half up and half down.
The law of attraction matches our experience with the balance of our thoughts. If we’re half up and half down, no wonder we get so many things we don’t like in our lives. We go up, and great things happen. We go down, and lousy things happen. Our experiences teeter-totter in perfect rhythm with our thought vibration.
What we need, I’ve decided, is a nice fat focus on likes that is so big and so heavy that it catapults us into the air and leaves us there. That “up” position on the teeter-totter is Abraham-Hicks’ vortex. It’s vibrational alignment with all we desire.
I know you’ve had times in your life when something you like SO commands your attention that you don’t even notice negative things. Falling in love comes to mind. Christmas morning, a major win in sports, landing a big job, winning money—these are all such big, heavy likes that they fire us into the air and leave us there for a time.
But how can we focus on something that feels that good when nothing that good is happening in our “what is” reality?
We can either get so adept at visualizing from a place of “I already have what I want” that we feel like we’re focusing on something good that already exists OR we can focus on so many little likes that they glom onto each other and form a big heavy blob of positive energy that acts the same way a single, heavy focus does.
I’m still working on visualizing from the place of “I already have what I want.” I’m playing with a new visualizing technique that I’ll report on when I have a little more practice with it. In the meantime, though, I’m finding that just being aware of the thought teeter totter is making it possible for me to consciously look at more likes than dislikes.
Just over the last day or so, I’ve begun to see all this little likes come together to create a fat focus that is starting to weigh down the other end of my teeter-totter so I’m up in the air more often. It’s pretty fun to feel that high (excuse the pun).
Are you aware of how much your thoughts are teetering up and down? Pay attention. You may need to create your own “fat focus” to raise you up.
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.
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!!
After devoting countless hours to the labor of love that is this blog, I have decided to redirect my energy away from it. Over the last few weeks, I have been maintaining this blog (marginally) along with my new site, Up From Splat, and my other hobby blog, The Joyful Springer. I have come to accept that this is more than I want to do.
Imagine a cute little toddler who is learning to walk. She’s gotten to a point where she can pull herself upright. She can take herky-jerky steps, those steps that always remind me of the lurching gate of the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. She can careen a few feet before she plops on her adorable tush. She does this over and over, stumbling, tripping, falling, trying again.
The graphic visual spotlighted how much my thoughts go up and down, up and down, up and down. Just in the short five-minute drive from our house to the forest where I walk Ducky, for instance, I watched my thoughts do something like this:
