The Secret Is Wags

A couple weeks ago, I joined Good Vibe University (GVU).  Some of you I know are already members.  If you aren’t, you’ll want to watch the video below to learn more about this great resource.

Fast Tube by Casper

Take advantage of the $1 three-week trial membership to Good Vibe University.

My $1 has already gotten me a couple hundred times that in value.

As part of what Jeannette calls The Money Party, GVU member Kim Falconer gave free astrological chart readings focusing on the vibe of money to interested members.  Kim did my chart, and although astrology isn’t my thing, her insights were spot on, and she offered me some powerful ideas to help me shift my alignment on the subject of money.

Another member who is an intuitive offered free half-hour sessions to discuss business goals and vibrations, and I’m scheduled to talk with her next week.  This is a fantastic, valuable support for what I’m doing.

If you’re not already a GVU member, I hope you’ll check it out.  If you do, I’ll see you on the forum.

Share on Facebook

Monday, the rain came back.  Hurray!

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…)

Share on Facebook

On the way to my B.A. in Psychology about 30 years ago, I took a course in memory—how it works, how to improve it, how it impacts our personality.  The bulk of the grade for the course came from a thesis-like term paper, in which we had to put forth a theory of memory using an analogy to an ordinary object or set of objects.

I chose a big gyrating bowl of cherries.  My theory was that the system of neurological connections that handle memory was like this bowl in that each memory was a new cherry dropped into the moving bowl.  As the bowl churned the contents, the cherries agitated, and the new, whole cherries (new memories) got broken down over time.  Eventually they became bits and juice and pits.  The bits, I suggested, were those snippets of memory we have that are incomplete, that we can’t seem to connect with other things.  The juice is all of our memories, most of it not accessible by our conscious mind but there nonetheless.  The pits are long term memories, the ones that we can easily pull up.

I believe I had some theory about how to keep the cherries whole for longer periods of time, but that theory turned into juice in my own bowl of cherries. Of course, I made all this up, but it must have made some sense because the professor gave me an A+.

My own personal bowl of cherries spit out the pit of this paper several days ago when I was thinking about how to make my visualization time feel more real and therefore more enjoyable.  As I’ve written about before, visualization can do more harm than good when it isn’t done right.  And despite knowing this, I’ve felt recently that I haven’t been doing it right … still.

I know that effective visualization must have two aspects: (more…)

Share on Facebook

So I have this new job—to align with prosperity.  Part of the job description is easy—pay attention to how I feel and do only what feels good.  Part of the job description requires a bit more effort—find good feeling thoughts as much as possible.

I’ve been working on the good-feeling thoughts for some time, and I’ve gone from amazed to amused about how determined my mind is to find something negative to cogitate about.

I’ve been programmed to grousing instead of gratitude.

And I’m not alone.  Last weekend, I spent a little time with a friend who is aware of the law of attraction and who believes that our thoughts do indeed create reality.  In the short hour or so we were together, I lost track of the number of times she found the negative side of a subject.  Even when I was talking about something fun, she brought up a worry or warning about it. (more…)

Share on Facebook

When you’re in the kind of financial mess we’re in, you get a lot of creditor phone calls. Our phone rings a couple dozen times a day … all credit card companies wanting their money. Who blames them? I want to give them their money; truly I do.

The credit card debt consolidation company we’re working with has advised us not to talk to any of these companies because the companies are known for harassing and bullying people, and all of our companies have been notified that the consolidation company is now our spokesperson for negotiating settlements. So we don’t answer these calls.

We’ve blocked some of them, but they use dozens of numbers. They call our home phone and our cell phones.

For months, this has been a HUGE source of stress for me. Every 30 minutes or so, the phone ring, and our helpful phone system announces, in it’s mechanical female-sounding voice, “Call from credit card services,” or “Call from toll free” or “Call from [name of company].”

It only took a couple of weeks of this before I started tensing every time the phone rang. I could feel the fear all through my body. Roiling stomach. Tight shoulders. Clenched jaw. The sensation of someone sticking a vacuum cleaner tube down my throat and sucking the air from my lungs.

I have always had great credit. I’ve been very careful about that. The only debt I thought I had (until I found out that Tim had been keeping all this credit card debt from me) was our mortgage. I don’t know how to be okay with being in this situation. It goes against who I am.

In other words, I have HUGE resistance to being in this situation. I HATE knowing that my credit is trashed. To use Abraham-Hicks terms, the calls pull me out of the Vortex, out of alignment.

I now know what it feels like to experience that old cliché, the wolves are circling. Although … I like wolves. So let’s say sharks. These companies definitely seem like sharks to me.

Of course, I’ve been aware that my reaction to these calls is resistance, and I know that I’m most definitely NOT in alignment when I feel all those negative feelings about the calls. But I haven’t been able to change the way I responded.

Until now …

This morning, the phone rang while I was eating breakfast. It was one of those calls. Most of these calls are hang-ups. But once in awhile, someone leaves a message. When someone leaves a message, we hear it being recorded.

So I listened to a woman leave a message about the “business” we have with them and “opportunities” we need to discuss. I kept eating my breakfast, and when the message ended, I noticed something.

I wasn’t tense.

I wasn’t upset.

In fact, I was totally calm.

Hmm.

I hadn’t really noticed anything changing over the last several days, but it seems I’ve been making a shift about how I respond to these calls.

I thought about what I’d just listened to. Why didn’t it upset me?

I realized it didn’t upset me because I’d somehow disconnected the meaning of the call from the sound of the call. I’d heard the voice and the words, but I hadn’t hooked those words to anything else.

It was just a voice on the answering machine recorder.

Aha!

There it is.

This is the answer to how we can be selective about what we pay attention to.

In 1964, two psychologists, Colin Blakemore and G.F. Cooper, set out to test selective perception and as scientists are fond of doing, they decided to use innocent critters to do it. They put newborn kittens in one of two environments. One environment had only horizontal lines and the other had only vertical lines. The kittens spent five months in these environments.

When the five months were up, the kittens were removed from their limited environments. And guess what? The kittens that saw only vertical lines for five months bumped into horizontal things as if they couldn’t see them. And vice versa for the kittens who had seen only horizontal lines. The scientists had trained selective perception into these poor kittens.

The same thing has happened to us. We have learned selective perception. Through our life experiences, through what the media bombards us with, through beliefs and instructions from parents, teachers, friends, and others, we have come to see our environment in a certain way.

Sometimes the way we process our world serves us. It serves us if it makes us feel good.

More often, the way we process our world limits us. It limits us if it makes us feel bad.

Because of my background regarding credit and creditors and debt , I’ve been perceiving all these phone calls in a negative way. I’ve processed them as harbingers of doom, symbols of failure, badges of shame. No wonder I had all those physical reactions to them.

It wasn’t the CALLS that were the problem. It was my thought about the calls.

It went something like this: A creditor is calling us. I hate that we have so much debt. How could Tim have done this to us? I feel like such a failure. What if we can’t pay the debt off? What will happen to us? We could lose our house ……

One thought hooks to another and another and soon I have this train streaking through my mind: The Doom Train. Sounds like a movie title; all it needs is a little tag line: “Be afraid; be very afraid.”

Probably because of my commitment to feeling good and my pact to give up complaining for a week, I didn’t allow myself to make all those negative connections when I heard the call today.

Instead of using that old “train of thought,” (that’s one cliché that has a lot of truth in it), I let my thought be a little solitary pump car. You know those little railroad maintenance vehicles that have the handles you pump up and down to move the little cart down the railroad track?

That’s what my thought was. A solitary little thought: “Well, there’s a creditor call.”

That was it. No connecting thoughts. No Doom Train.

Wow.

Very cool.

If I can do that for these calls, can’t I do it for everything else too?

I really can choose what I pay attention to.

In this case, I just paid attention to the voice on the machine, and I didn’t allow myself to linger on the words or all the meaning I usually attach to the words. And as soon as the call was over, I returned to focusing on my breakfast, which I was enjoying.

Whew! This has been a long post.

But figuring out how to turn my thoughts into pump cars instead of railroad cars hooked one to the other feels like a breakthrough.

It’s going to be so much easier to feel good when I don’t have to attach one bad thought to another.

How about it? Wouldn’t you like to turn your negative thoughts into pump cars? One thought = just a little pump car. It rolls on by. It means nothing. It’s gone.

If we’re going to create trains with our thought, why not create positive trains? Instead of a Doom Train, I want a Happy Choo-Choo. Don’t you?

Now that I’ve made it my intention, I know the law of attraction will help out and bring me more good thoughts.

What kind of train do you have chugging through your head?

Share on Facebook

After my post, Amplify, Amplify, Amplify,  Mel commented, “Wow, what a difference a day can make.” She was referring to the fact that two days before, I had written about not liking any of the choices I felt like I was facing. My frustration clearly came through at that point, and two days later, my improved mindset was equally clear.

Fifteen years ago, I took medication for severe depression (bipolar). I was in treatment for about five years from 1992 to 1997. I was told then that feeling bad was chemical. It was something I couldn’t control. I had to take a pill to get past it.

In 1997, I decided that the medication (I was on 12 different ones over those five years) was doing me far more harm than good. My path of least resistance (though I didn’t call it that then) was to stop taking the meds and find natural ways to improve my mood. I embarked on years of experimenting with foods and natural supplements and meditation and visualization, all of which were far more helpful than all the psychotropic drugs the doctors had prescribed.

It wasn’t until I began studying Abraham-Hicks, though, that I was able to put the notion of being “bipolar” or a “depression sufferer” behind me. It was then that I discovered I had the power to shift my mood from bad to good in a matter of seconds, just by choosing different thoughts.

I began to see that by thinking of myself as someone prone to depression I had been attracting thoughts that matched up with depression. I also began to see that my energy level was directly correlated to what I was thinking. When I was thinking about lack, I felt despair and no energy (i.e., I was “depressed”). When I was excited about something I wanted or appreciating something I had, I felt energized.

In the last few years, I’ve had a lot of times that other people would label “depression.” But I no longer call my low energy times depression. I know that when I’m indulging in a funk, it’s happening because I’m being lazy about the way I’m thinking.

“What about the brain chemistry?” someone once asked me when I told her that she controls her moods.

I know our bodies generate different chemicals when we’re down than when we’re up, but those chemical changes aren’t out of our control. Our vibrations and thoughts are the catalysts for whatever chemicals roam through our bodies. Years ago, I read an example of this in a book (can’t remember which one) by Deepak Chopra. He said two people can look at a roller coaster, and one person’s body will generate an “upper” chemical. This person loves roller coasters. The other person’s body will generate a “downer” chemical. This person is terrified of roller coasters. These chemicals are real—they’ve been measured scientifically. But they were generated by a thought (either “roller coasters are fun” or “roller coasters are dangerous”).

Since yesterday, I’ve been totally calm, serene even, about my finances.

Nothing in my experience has changed, but where I’m putting my attention HAS changed. I have changed. And I did it in an instant.

That’s the power of a moment.

One thought, which attracts another thought and another and another. I’m drawing more and more feel good thoughts to me with each moment.

It’s in my control. And it’s in yours.

Share on Facebook

Right after I wrote my last post on Letting Go, I had a conversation with my friend, Melanie Greer Deason.  Melanie is a great distance healer (if you want to know how to get in touch with her, contact me and I’ll tell you how—she’s great!).  She’s also a very wise woman.

I told Melanie about how I was manifesting the little stuff but not the big stuff.

“I’m blocked from the money,” I said.

“Oh, don’t say that,” she admonished me.  “Your words have power.  If you say you’re blocked or think you’re blocked, you ARE blocked.”

Duh.  I KNEW that.  But there I was doing it anyway.

“Think of what’s between you and the money you want as a flimsy veil or curtain,” Melanie said, “something that’s obscuring your ability to see what you want but something you can easily move aside to get what you want.”

Of course!

Her words reminded me of something that happened last year.

In March, we bought a memory foam bed and put it on a wood platform Tim built.  It was a lousy bed, and in a couple months, it began breaking down.  We’d gotten it from Costco (I love Costco), so we returned it and got a new memory foam bed–different brand, and we love it.

When the Costco people came to take away the old bed, we discovered a huge moldy wet spot on the mattress and the platform underneath my side of the bed.  YUCK!

I’d been having hot flashes during those three months, and apparently my body heat had made the mattress sweat.  (I’ve since discovered Estroven—highly recommend it; no more hot flashes–if you’re interested, I get the best price at Costco.)

All that time, I’d been sleeping on this big moldy spot and had no idea.  It was right there, just a foot from my butt, and I couldn’t see it.

That incident reminded me that Abraham-Hicks says that 99.9 percent of what we want is completely created before we see evidence of it.  That’s because that much of the creation is done on the nonphysical plane.  So the money I want could be just like that wet, moldy spot—right there, just a foot from me!

Melanie’s right.  There is no block.  There’s just me not yet seeing what I want to see.  And I can choose to move aside the veil that separates me from what I want by deliberately focusing my thoughts on things that make me feel good!

Share on Facebook

In her book, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, best-selling author and medical intuitive Caroline Myss, talks about the power that lies in being wounded.

“One day, in passing, I introduced a friend of mine to two gentlemen I was talking with,” says Myss in her book. “Within two minutes, my friend managed to let these men know that she was an incest survivor. Her admission had nothing whatsoever to do with the conversation we’d been having, and in a flash I realized that she was using her wounds as leverage. She had gotten to the point that she defined herself by a negative experience.”

Once Myss became attuned to this phenomenon, which she dubbed woundology, she saw it everywhere. “In workshops and in daily life I saw that, rather than working to get beyond their wounds, people were using them as social currency,” says Myss. “They were confusing the therapeutic value of self-expression with permission to manipulate others with their wounds. Who would want to leave that behind? Health never commands so much clout!”

Have you ever noticed how we lead with what’s wrong?  People ask how you are, and you tell them about your latest illness or injury or “horrible” experience.  They immediately respond with their latest injury or problem.

I get this everyday from my mom.  She delights in telling me about the latest physical ailments that have been visited upon her or my dad.  She tells me about every little thing that has gone wrong.  These stories usually start with, “Oh, yesterday, we had a horrible experience.” These “horrible” experiences can range from getting a phone call that awakens them to having a deer in their backyard that’s having trouble figuring out how to get back out over the fence to getting bad service in a restaurant.

Of course, I speak fluent woundology too (most everyone does).

I speak it less than I used to though.  Many years ago, I stopped saying, “I’m depressed” or “I’m bipolar” or “I have an eating disorder.”  I began giving up the labels that were essentially badges for my wounds.

But I didn’t give up woundology completely.  Now, I’ve decided to reject the language.

Why do I need to tell someone about how my sinuses are stuffed up because of something blooming in my yard?  Who needs to know about my ankle pain?  My financial mess?  My struggles with food?  Etc.  Etc.  Etc.

There’s always something good going on.  My new intention is to ALWAYS find something good to say when people ask, “How are you?”

And if someone speaks woundology to me, I’ll listen, smiling and nodding, the way people who can’t understand a language do when they don’t have a clue what someone is saying to them.  I will not respond in kind.

It’s resolves like this, I’m convinced, that are going to make it possible for me to finally stick with this experiment.  Think about it.  If we’re talking about bad things, what is the law of attraction going to bring to us?  Bad things, of course.

Woundology puts us on a vibrational match with more wounds.  Who wants that?

I sure don’t.  So I’m talking about the good stuff!

Share on Facebook

Earlier this week, a VERY wise friend e-mailed me the following advice:

“It’s okay if you have set backs, doubts and stuff.  It’s okay.  It’s life.  That’s only human and makes sense, especially when you’re in the predicament you’re in.  You’d be really crazy not to worry BUT my humble opinion is that you really have to try harder.  I’m not sure if you’re trying to follow the principles of Abraham-Hicks.  Are you really?   You seem to have the teachings down pact.  You know a lot of the quotes, but are you putting it into real practice and making an attempt to continue that practice?
”I suppose it’s okay if part of your experiment is that you tried to do the happy thoughts thing and you weren’t able to sustain it for X amount of days.  I guess that’s part of the experiment, too.  However, I’m just wondering …

“Question:  How many more days do you have for your experiment?   One more week?  What will it take to truly give in to GOOD thoughts (HAPPY thoughts) for just 5 more days and truly see if Abraham-Hicks is right — truly see if your experiment works or not?  What will it take to put some blinders on against the negative stuff, the negative thinking, the negative memories and only think positively for, for example, 5 days?   What will it really take to really put Abraham-Hicks teachings into REAL practice — for 5 days only.  Not 30 days, not 20 days, not even 10 days.  I guess, sometimes, we have to start with small steps, baby steps.  Maybe 30 days of this experiment is not good for you.  It’s not what you need.

“It’s okay to feel overwhelmed and have doubts and be confused but you set out to do your experiment.  So, why don’t you start over for the next couple of days and take each day one at a time.  And if you feel the panic coming on or the doubt coming on or the confusion coming on, you do everything in your power to fight it.  Do more of what makes you happy when you feel that doubt coming on.  And see what happens.  That’s your real experiment.  That’s your real reason for experimenting.  To see if it will really work.  Right now, it’s not working fully because you’re not fully participating in the process.  And then if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.  Then you move on.  You can truly say that you gave it your all in this experiment process and it didn’t work.  Am I making sense. Stop thinking about what you shoulda, coulda, woulda done in the past to fix any problems…   Think about what you’re going to do in the moment and how you’re going to ACTIVELY implement what you’re learning from Abraham-Hicks teachings.

“My whole point is keep trying to stick to your experiment exercise.  Keep trying to let the happy thoughts rule and let’s see what will happen.  See what will really happen.  Give your experiment a real chance to see if it works or not.  In order to do it, you really have to try.”

And I couldn’t possibly have said it any better myself.

So for the rest of the month of February, I have a new motto.  I try harder.

Share on Facebook

In my virtual reality, this is how I spent my day.

I woke up just before 8.  Ducky and her sister, Dandy, lay against me in the bed, their eyes open, waiting for me to wake up.  When I pushed the button on my nightstand to open our black-out shades, both dogs turned into wiggle-waggle-squeaking machines.  We exchanged exuberant oh-my-god-it’s-been-forever-since-we’ve-seen-you greetings while I looked out the window at the sun’s glitter on the surface of the ocean.

Tim had already left to go play golf.  So I threw on my clothes, made a quick fruit smoothie, and the dogs and I set off for our walk on our acreage.  We have four mile-plus long trails, and we did all of them today.  Sun shining.  Cool breeze.  It was a wonderful walk.

I returned home, rinsed their feet in the Springer room (where we groom them), then went downstairs to the work-out room.  I spent 4 minutes on the ROM and another 20 minutes practicing a dance routine I’m working on.  The dogs watched me and rated my performance at a 7 out of 10—needs work.  We all went back upstairs and I got into the Bath Cave (Tim’s name for our large stone shower).  After my shower, I ate a small bowl of cereal.

I had have no writing deadlines right now, so after I ate, I went (with dogs at my side, of course) up to my art studio.  I’ve been taking watercolor lessons, and I’m working on a landscape of the view from our home.  From the expressions on Ducky’s and Dandy’s faces, I think they rate it even lower than my dance routine; but I’m having fun with it.

When Tim came home about 12:30, he found me at my easel.  He and the dogs exchanged their wild greetings.  He smelled all “golfy”—a mixture of grass and sweat and satisfaction.  He said he was getting in the hot tub and wanted company.  That was fine by me.

We spent the next 45 minutes in the hot tub while the dogs snoozed nearby (they ran like crazy on their walk and were still worn out).  I love the hot tub—it never fails to put Tim and I in a great mood, if you know what I mean. I’m surprised he has so much energy after golfing, but he does, which is great.

Tim took a shower.  I threw on some clothes and went down to the music room to practice piano and singing the harmony part I’m learning for a song Tim and I are working on together.  Ducky and Dandy got their second wind and wrestled on the exercise mat outside the music room.

After my practice, I went to my office and updated my Joyful Springer blog.  Tim was in his shop.  He’s working on a table for some friends of ours.  He’s been learning so much from our neighbor, who’s been wordworking for years.

I went back up to my studio to do some cartoon drawing and was surprised when Tim came in and told me it was almost 7.  I really got lost in what I was doing.

Tim and I made burritos for dinner with fresh guacamole for me.  He’s cleaning up the kitchen while I make this post, and then we’re going up to the SPAP (Scrabble, Ping pong And Pool) room to play some pool.  We’ll probably watch a movie in bed later.  The dogs love it when we do that because they can curl up with us.

It’s been a wonderful day in the Waggery, which means it’s been a normal day.  I’m so blessed.

…and this was me telling the story of what I want, not what is.

Share on Facebook