The Secret Is Wags

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…)

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Okay, so I know yesterday I said the thing to do when you have doubts is to keep swimming.  But as with all the spelling rules that drive Tim nuts, the swimming “rule” has an exception.

Or at least I think it does.

Abraham-Hicks remind us, “Your choices of action may be limited–but your choices of thought are not.”

By the end of Wednesday, I didn’t know what my next best action was.  The actions I was taking, actions intended to promote my revamped novel writing instructional package, didn’t feel good.  I was a bundle of tension, most definitely out of alignment.  I wasn’t choosing helpful thoughts.

I have worked everyday for the last six weeks.  It didn’t feel like work most of the time.  I was having fun, so I didn’t notice I was barreling along.

When I stopped having fun, I noticed.

And thought I gave it a valiant effort, I couldn’t find a thought about what I was doing that felt good.

So I decided it was time for one of my Puppy Days.

Puppy Days Instead of Sick Days

When I worked in the “real world,” I got sick a lot.  I missed one or two or more days of work every month. I wasn’t faking it.  I had physical symptoms of colds, flus, bronchitis … my body was creative in finding ways to give me a break from work.

Because that’s what these illnesses were, I found out after I left my legal writing instructor job.  Once I began working at home and I allowed myself to stop working whenever I felt the need for a break, I stopped getting sick. Nowadays, I get a cold every couple years or so, and that’s about it.

So what’s a Puppy Day?

It’s a do-nothing day.  I usually spend mine in my pjs, curled up with a great novel.

Inspired by the fact that puppies go, go, go and then suddenly collapse in a pile of total relaxation, Puppy Days are my way of recharging.

And they’re my way of shifting my thought vibration.

Because I wasn’t sure what to do next and all my thinking about it was churning me into a negative place, I knew the best thing for me to do was remove my thoughts from the subject completely.  A Puppy Day was just what I needed.  The tension that had been building had dissipated by the end of the day.  I’m still not sure what to do next, but I’m back in a more peaceful place, definitely more aligned, which is the point.

And if You Can’t Take a Puppy Day?

Yesterday, a reader of this blog commented on Facebook, “Even though I’m more of a cat person, I really do enjoy Ande’s blog.”

Mea culpa.

I have been disregarding cat people.

Though I don’t have a cat at the moment, I like cats.  They have every bit as much to teach us as dogs do—they just go about it differently.  Whereas dogs are more like grade school teachers, making the lessons fun and interactive, cats remind me more of my law school professors—generally reserved and far more Socratic in their teaching method.  Cats will give you a hint, but then you have to figure it out for yourself.

The kitty way of finding alignment isn’t that tough to figure out, though.  Just spend an hour or so watching a cat, and you’ll learn some important skills.

First, cats do what they do with pure, intense focus.  Have you ever watched a cat stare at a bird or a spot on the wall?  They know how to control their thoughts and put them right where they want them to be.

Second, cats relish the simple things in life.  Take bathing, for example.  Cats make grooming seem like one step from ecstasy.

Third, cats know how to recharge.  A cat can flop and rest pretty much anywhere.  Though cats are physically capable of great speed and agility, they are just as able to turn into furry noodles.

It’s these skills that can take the place of Puppy Days.

When you can’t get your thoughts to shift, no matter what you do, you need to take a Kitty Break:

1. Spend a minute of total focus on something you appreciate.
2. Do some simple task, like putting on hand lotion or brushing your hair, and let it soothe you
3. Take five minutes to deliberately relax every muscle in your body, or if you can, grab a 15 minute or longer nap

These little shifts in energy can help you get access to higher-vibrational thoughts.

When it comes to living in the sea of abundance that surrounds us, for sure we need to keep swimming.  But once in while, we need to drift into the thoughts that help us align with who we really are.

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.

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So we need to have what we want in order to get it.  Got it?

And how do we pull this rabbit out of our hats?

(Sorry, couldn’t resist the bunny reference—it is, after all, Easter …. By the way, if Ducky in her bunny ears doesn’t make you feel good, check your pulse.)

Since I had my big “By Jove, I think I’ve got it” moment, I’ve been working on how to integrate this awareness into actual practice in my life.  I know I need to be the woman I want to be in order to be her, but how exactly do I do that?

The way I do this is to know that I have already become her.  I AM her.  The moment that I decided to be this woman, I became her.

In actual physicality? No, not exactly.

But my nonphysical self became her, and my nonphysical self is where all my power lies; so that part of me is the part that matters.

It looks like we live in a physical world.  We’re surrounded by all this stuff, all these EVIDENCE of facts and things.

But all of this evidence is an illusion.

We live in a world of energy, a world of vibration.  The physical manifestations of that energy are just interpretations of all that energy and vibration.

So it doesn’t matter what we’re seeing or experiencing on the physical level.  What matters is what we are on the nonphysical level.  Where is our intention?  What have we already become?

To be happy, to feel good, I have to be who I am.  And by “who I am” I mean the woman who is already living all that I desire.

In order to do this, what I’ve been doing for the last couple days is make every move I make and every thought I think one that the ME of I am what I am would think.

There I go being confusing again.

Let’s see if I can paint a picture.

Pretend I’m Ducky.  I’m hanging out.  I see a leaf.  I want the leaf.  I pick up the leaf.  I have the leaf.  I wag my tail because I have the leaf and I’m happy about it.  I drop the leaf, and I still wag my tail because the leaf was just one way for me to be happy.  The truth is that I’m just happy.  It’s who I am.  And all I have to be is be what I am.

So on the human front, I have become Ande, the woman who has financial security and success.  I don’t need these things anymore because I have them.  I have chosen to become the truth of my I am.  I am secure and successful and happy.  And all I have to do is live consistently with what I am.

Whenever I feel bad, I know that I am not being the woman I am.  I am being some other woman, some woman from my past, one who is the product of all my old vibrations, the ones that weren’t lined up with the truth of who I am.

And what am I to do with all this evidence around me? All this physical evidence?

I see it as the light of a star.

All those lights you see in the sky at night are not real.  They are the product of a star that died a long, long time ago.  The light looks real, but it isn’t.

In the same way, the evidence of financial lack in my life right now (low account balance, debt etc) are just evidence of my old vibration, my old life.  Not real.  Evidence of lack of success is evidence of an old vibration.

The truth of I am what I am isn’t out there; it’s in here.

“I am what I am” means that I am being the real me, the me that has already achieved, in energetic form, all that I desire.  It means that I am no longer trying to be something I’m not yet.  I’m being who I am.

And what does this have to do with manifesting what you want?  Everything … and nothing.

It means everything because, by the law of attraction, when you become what you want, what you want must come.  It means nothing because when you become the I am of who you are, you are no longer trying to manifest anything.  You don’t need to.  You feel great now.

Another example.  Tim’s I am is a financially secure millionaire lottery winner.  That is who Tim is.  That is his reality.  He doesn’t need to win a lottery because he already has.  He feels like he has.  He’s as happy now as he will be when the physical reality matches up with his inner reality, the I am of his nonphysical self.

Since we want what we want to feel good, then feeling good now seems like a much more efficient way of living then trying to get things to make us feel good.  So the way to feel good is to take on the identity of the person who think you would be if you had what you think you need to have in order to feel good.

Get this in your head:  I am what I am.

Here’s something that could help:

Fast Tube by Casper

Nothing is more important than feeling good.  Feeling good is a natural by product of being the “I am” you want to be.

Feeling good becomes easy when you know you ARE what you are.

Let me know what you think.  Does this make sense to you?  Any thoughts?

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.

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Today’s Abraham-Hicks quote was:

“There is not something you’re supposed to do.  There’s not something that you should do.  There is only that which you are inspired to do.  And how do you get inspired except by the contrast? It’s the life experience that gives you the idea of the desire, and then as you focus upon the desire, the Energy flows.”

So I did very little today because I’m not inspired.  I have been trying to talk myself into being inspired to do things I don’t want to do.  It’s not working.

So my feel good places came from time with Ducky today (she never fails to make me smile—even when she exasperates me ) and a good mystery novel and the rain and my husband who tells me he loves me every day.

All I can do is focus on how I want to feel and wait for inspiration.

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I had to get something from Tim’s desk.  Tim has a sign on his desk that says, “I’m too busy to be neat.”  Need I say more about the state of his workspace?  I usually have to dig if I want to find anything.

So I was digging, and unfortunately, my excavation unearthed some rejection letters from agents to whom I’ve been submitting screenplays and other projects.  Tim, bless him, checks our P.O. box and keeps track of my submissions.  He doesn’t take them personally; I do.  I saw those letters, and I felt my energy plummet.  I felt bad, and I knew it.

What was I feeling?  Anger?  Disappointment?  Sadness?  Probably all of the above and other gems like shame and fear.

In the past, I would have wallowed in these feelings for a bit.  But I’m in the first week of my feel good experiment, so I wasn’t going to indulge in that crud.

Find something to feel good about, I commanded myself.  Convincing myself I’m a great writer at that moment wasn’t exactly within my reach.  Telling myself that my work will find the right home didn’t work either.  I needed to get off the topic of writing and selling completely.

I spotted Ducky sprawled on the sofa.  She looked up at me and wagged her stub of a tail.  I approached her, and her whole body wiggled.  I sat down and hugged her.  Ahh.  That felt better.

Abraham says we don’t have to go from feeling bad to perfect joy; all we have to do is feel relief.  Pet my dog—feel relief.  Works every time.

Thank the universe for Ducky!  She’s my fastest access to feeling good most of the time.  This morning, I grinned nonstop for 45 minutes while I watched her play with her friend in the woods.  That’s some seriously great alignment there!

Dogs are poster beings for great vibrations.  Such joy!

If you don’t have a dog, find something that lights you up.  We all need something to flip the switch from sad to glad.  The life we want to live depends on it.

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The mind is like an untrained dog, one left to languish in a backyard, maybe on a tether or in a kennel, not given instruction, not guided to happy purpose.  Most of us are extraordinarily lazy about what we think.

I’m sure that’s why so many people, including me, are still waiting for all the things we thought the law of attraction would bring to us.  Most don’t realize that the law of attraction is bringing a match to our thoughts all the time; the reason what we’re getting isn’t what we want is because the majority of our thoughts aren’t a vibrational match to what we want.

Lazy thoughts are “what is” thoughts, observation of something that’s going on, something that happened to you or someone else or something going on in the world.  We think we need to talk about current events (sometimes to such lengths that if the topic were a dead horse, we’d have pulverized it into mere wisps of tissue by the time we’re done).

The truth is that unless something is what we want, unless it truly makes us glad or brings us hope or makes us feel appreciation, it is not something we need to be talking about.  This includes disasters like those in Haiti—which doesn’t mean we ignore them.  You can put your attention on something that needs to be done, like bringing aid to people who need it, but the attention needs to be on the solution, not the problem.  Lamenting what has happened doesn’t help anyone.  We have to learn to start where we are and find thoughts that bring relief.

What you focus on perpetuates.

I KNOW this.

But do I control my thoughts accordingly?

Nope.

I let my thoughts meander like that untrained dog, digging holes (coming up with terrifying scenarios about what might happen in the future), chewing on shoes and furniture (running problems through my head over and over), barking at every little noise (paying attention to anything around me, whether I like it or not).

This morning, in spite of that intention to feel good and feel happy, I woke up aware of my financial situation.  I threw a choker chain over my mind and yanked it away from that unhappy line of thinking.  I put it in a nice heel next to thoughts of things I like (my bed, a memory foam/latex foam combo, is very comfortable and much of the hip and back pain I had before I got it is gone; the storm we had last night blew through quickly and left behind no damage; Ducky greets me with delightful enthusiasm each morning as if I’m the most fascinating person in the world).

But as the morning went on, I realized my thoughts must have been someplace I didn’t like because I felt flat and blah.  Not sad or depressed.  Not consciously angry or discouraged.  Just a little lethargic.

This definitely wasn’t the “I feel happy—it’s a perfect day” the way I wanted to feel.

Tim and I were walking in the forest with Ducky (another thing to feel good about), and I told him I wanted to lift my energy.

He said, “What do you want?  Tell me about things you want.”  (Another thing to appreciate—I have a very supportive husband!)

So I started telling him about the house I want us to buy—I talked about the rooms and the view and the property it sat on.  I talked about its location and what I wanted to do to the house.

Once I started talking, I felt SO much better.  I could feel my energy rising; a little surge of enthusiasm started percolating.

Since then, I’ve been able to build on that by using this “what do you want?” focus as a leash that pulls my mind back in line when it starts circling the yard of fear and sadness.

Ducky, at less than 6 months old, is better trained than my meandering mind.  It’s time to change that.

I’ve got 29 days left to teach my mind enough feel-good tricks to change my life.

I think I’m off to a good start.

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I met my husband in high school.  At the time, I was dating someone else.  Tim was just a friend.  He was cute, kind of goofy, very sweet.  He was in the school bands (not cool), and he dressed kind of funky (less cool), but he was appealing in a rollicking puppy sort of way.  He made an impression.

My freshman year of college, my boyfriend broke up with me.  Over Christmas break, I went to a party and saw my boyfriend.  Tim was there too.  I flirted with Tim in an effort to convince my ex that I didn’t give a flying rip that he’d dumped me.  (I was 18—what can I say?)  I discovered that Tim was fun, attentive, a gentleman.  He was creative, interesting, kind, and gentle.  He played the piano for me, loved my dog, was polite to my parents.  I started being glad my boyfriend dumped me.  Tim and I started dating.

We dated for three weeks.  He went off to Army Basic Training.  I returned to college.  We exchanged letters.  Then I stopped hearing from him.  I returned to our home town for Spring Break, and he was there.  I went to see him.  He was totally different—cold, distant, closed down.

He’d witnessed a buddy dying in a training accident.  It had messed with his head.

When I went back to school, I wrote Tim several more letters.  He never wrote me back.  I moved on.

I met my first husband in my sophomore year.  We married after graduation, went to law school together, moved to a new state, got jobs, bought a house, made a life.

I never forgot Tim.

I’d think of him from time to time, always with appreciation for the time we’d spent together.  I wondered where he was and what he was doing.

After my first husband and I split up, I found myself fantasizing from time to time about finding Tim and getting back together with him.  I always saw it as a beautiful love story—he was his old self in my imagination—loving, kind, warm, and gentle, still creative and playing music.

I didn’t obsess over him.  In fact, I spent months not thinking of him at all, but when I did think of him, I saw us together.

At the end of 2000, I had a dream about Tim.  I don’t remember the dream, but I remember waking up with a powerful thought pulsing in the forefront of my mind:  Find Tim.

This wasn’t an idle notion.  It felt like a directive.

So I went looking for him.

I looked on the internet.  I found four possibilities—four men with first and last name matching his.  None of them were in the state where we went to school, so I didn’t know which one was the right one, if any.  I was too shy to pick up the phone.

I stumbled into classmates.com and checked our school and graduating class (1978).  He wasn’t there.  Not a big surprise.  We had over 700 people in our graduating class.  I signed up, and then I let it go.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I said to the universe, “If I’m meant to find Tim, bring him to me.”

Two weeks later, I got an e-mail from classmates.com telling me that new people from my class had joined the site.  On a whim, I checked, and one of those people was Tim!  We’d stumbled into the site within 2 weeks of each other.

I sent him an e-mail.  He replied.  His e-mail started with, “Hello Beautiful!”

Like the movie line goes, he “had me at hello.”

We exchanged dozens of e-mails.  Had a couple phone conversations.  Spent hours in a chat room.

He was at the end of a marriage.  He was on the other side of the country.

A month, to the day, after I sent my e-mail to him, he left his home and drove across the country to move in with me.

My friends thought I was crazy.  I was warned that he could be an alcoholic, wife beater, drug addict.  One friend suggested Tim could have turned into an ax murderer, for all I knew.

Twenty years is a long time, I was warned.  He might not be the same person.

God, I hoped not.  I had no interest in being with an 18-year old guy.

When he arrived, it was as if we’d never been apart.

He’s the same Tim, only much better.  Not an alcoholic or wife beater or drug addict … or ax murderer.

We married a year later.

Like I keep saying, we get what we focus on.

When I moved into my current home after divorcing my first husband, I settled in to write.  It was me and Muggins.  I didn’t go out much.

My mother and friends warned me, “You’re never going to find a man if you don’t go out there and join things.”  I was told to join a church, local clubs.  I was told to go to bars, ball games, etc.

Those things weren’t for me.  Hanging out at home and taking long walks on the beach was for me.

The experts said I’d never find a man that way.

See what the experts know?

Tim is my walking, talking, cute and wonderful reminder that what I want can come to me in extraordinarily unexpected ways.

How many women in their forties are looking for a great guy?  I don’t know the stats, but I’d guess it’s millions.  I have something many women think is impossible to get—a man who thinks I’m beautiful no matter what size I am, a man who loves and respects me, supports me, desires me, and calls me his best friend.

If I can create that, how hard can it be to create financial abundance?

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I have spent literally thousands of dollars on books.  If I have a problem or want to do something, the first thing I do is run out and buy a book on how to solve the problem or do what I want to do.  If I can’t find a book on what I want to know, I go looking for a person who has experienced what I’m experiencing or knows what I want to know how to do.

In other words, I go looking for an expert.  In this respect, I’m pretty normal.

It’s what we all do.

Why do we love magazines?  Because they are filled with so much yummy advice.

Why do we love the Internet so much?  Because it makes it so easy to find out what other people think about the problem we’re trying to solve or the skill we’re trying to learn.

If you want to buy something, what’s the first thing you do?  If you’re like me and many others, you research what you’re thinking of buying; and that research includes finding out what other people think about the thing you want to buy.

If you’re sick, what do you do?  See a doctor.

Have a legal problem?  See a lawyer.

Plumbing issue?  Call a plumber.

All of this is perfectly reasonable.

But it’s also a little misguided … or at the least, very, very limiting.

Why?

It all goes back to “we create our own reality.”

Think about it.

Every single thing that exists in our world came to be because someone focused on it.  Someone desired something, thought about it, and aligned with it, and created a way to get it.

Every single thing.

All those scientific experiments that provide PROOF that certain things must be the way they are?  They’re just someone’s creation.

Ever wonder why they tell you coffee is bad for you one year and tell you it’s good for you the next?  It’s because all those studies they do to tell you what’s good and what’s bad are done by different individuals.  Each individual has his or her own take on the subject and his or her own vibrational alignment, and the results in the study are directly impacted by that take and vibration.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand:  there are no facts.

Nothing is ABSOLUTELY TRUE.

Everything we take to be true, we take to be true because someone else has taken it to be true and by focusing on that truth has created evidence of it.

If you really take a good look at what’s going on in our world and what has gone on in our past history, you’ll see that this has to be the case.  How else do you explain the never ending shifting of so-called facts?

Example:  Why are there so many diet books?  If a diet was a fact, wouldn’t it work for everyone?

The truth is there are as many ways to lose and gain weight as there are people in our world.  It’s all a matter of focus and alignment.

So does that mean we throw out all the books?

Of course not.  Experts can give us valuable information, great ideas that can help us create what we want.

I still read reviews before I buy products.  I still read books.

But here’s what I’ve learned to do with those reviews and those books.  Instead of taking every little bit of advice as “fact,” I read the information the same way I’d look at a grocery store aisle.  It’s all real, but do I want everything there?  Is it all right for me?

I pick and choose what advice I’ll take.  If I don’t like the horror story viewpoint of how something has to be done, I find another way to do it.

For example, I’ve read experts in selling novels say that you absolutely cannot sell a book to a big publisher without an agent.  I sold my novel to Bantam without an agent.

I can create whatever I want.  I keep repeating this to myself, like a mantra.

Wilber and Orville knew it.  Roger Banister knew it.  Edison knew it.  Just because it hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

The experts only know what has worked for them.  They don’t have all the answers.  I refuse to let them tell me what I can and can’t do.

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It’s really not complicated.  Here’s the task:  feel good no matter what is going on.

I’m committing to making it my priority to find something to appreciate in every single person, situation, and experience I have in every day.

I’m committing to focusing on (meaning thinking and talking about) ONLY something I like that I currently have or something I want.

It’s a 30 day experiment.  Will my life change?  Will money come my way?  Will Tim win his lottery?  (Check back—I’ll be posting about Tim’s attitude about the lottery.)

My two good friends with whom I’ve shared my intention to write this blog think this experiment is going to turn out great.  Maybe they’re just being supportive, but I choose to believe them.

I plan to start the full-out relentless appreciation on Sunday, January 17.  (Muggins was 17 years, and 17 days old when she died—it seems like a good day to make the official experiment start.)  I’m starting to appreciate and focus on good now, but I’ll spend the next few days talking about some yucky things I’ve created, some great stuff I’ve created, and the struggle I’ve had living in a world of fact since I’ve accepted that we live in a world of energy.

It’s my way of taking a deep breath before I jump in.

Feeling good and having good … here I come.

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Do you want the science behind the power of the mind?  Check out The Field:  The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe by Lynne McTaggart.  The book is about the zero point field, so-called because vibrational fluctuations in the field of all energy are still detectable in temperatures of absolute zero, which is the lowest possible energy state.

In this state, there should be no energy left because no more can be removed.  But there’s always some residual vibration due to virtual particle exchange.  Scientists discounted this vibration for years because it was always present.  In physics equations, physicists would subtract out the zero-point energy.  They called this process ‘renormalization.’  Their reasoning was that because the vibration was always present, it didn’t change anything and therefore didn’t count.  Seems a little cavalier to me, but there you go.

The zero point field turns out to be kind of important.  Think about it.  If you have all this energy, all the subatomic particles in constant flux, what you have is an inexhaustible energy force, a sort of supercharged link between all things.

The zero point field suggests that all matter in the universe is interconnected by subatomic waves that are spread out connecting one part of the universe to every other part.  Scientists now realize this field could be the explanation for all kinds of phenomenon previously unexplainable, such as the Chinese belief in chi, telepathy, and other psychic phenomenon.  It’s also why your mind can impact the world around you.

It’s also why anything you feel about something outside yourself is what you feel about yourself.  We’re all connected.  We’re all one energy.

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