The Secret Is Wags

My mother keeps many of her memories in a cedar chest at the end of her bed.  The trunk holds awards and clippings—I think she saved every newspaper column I ever wrote, and she has at least five copies of the first whole newspaper in which my first column appears.  The chest holds locks of hair and photographs and playbills.  And it holds some of my early artistic and literary efforts.

There’s the paper plate covered in uncooked pasta and sprayed with gold that I made in third grade.  There’s the misshapen sickly blue mug that I made in fifth grade.  There’s the stilted poetry I wrote throughout grade school, and the 20 page, 10 chapter “novel” I wrote when I was twelve (I think it started with something like “it was a dark and stormy night.”)

My mother treasures every one of these creations.  Why?  Because her only child made them.

Each of us is still the child we were when we were young enough to be making funky art projects.  Each of us is worthy of the kind of love that saves those projects.  Each of us deserves to have our creations treasured and celebrated. (more…)

Share on Facebook

About five years ago, I met an elderly gentleman who, according to his wife, could fall asleep within one minute of closing his eyes.  And he could do it in any situation.  Since I often took a long time to fall asleep, I was intrigued and I asked him how he did it.

He told me he learned his “trick” when he was a soldier in World War II.  Because sleep was imperative but sleeping conditions were abysmal, he had to find a way to get to sleep no matter what.  He tried several things and finally discovered one that has worked for him to this day:  When he closes his eyes, he puts all his concentration on relaxing his facial muscles. He consistently falls asleep within a minute of beginning the process. (more…)

Share on Facebook

It’s a Scrabble day.  Most Sundays, Tim and I manage to get in a game of Scrabble.  I won last week, not that I care one way or the other.  For me, it’s all about getting the best word scores I can in each turn.

Last Sunday, I had the seven-letter word, “unmined,” on my tray.  I looked all over the board and couldn’t find a place to play it.

Before my turn, I’d realized (excuse the indelicacy but I share it to make a point), that I needed to pee … badly.  I thought I could wait until the end of my turn, but as I scanned the board for a place to put my wonderful word, my bladder kept vying for my attention.  I wasn’t comfortable.

So I put aside my lap desk and went into the bathroom.  Ahh, better.

While I was up, I got a drink of water (must refill the tank), pet Ducky, and looked outside at the trees.  All of these things felt good. (more…)

Share on Facebook

Nearly every morning, I take my dog for a long walk.  This started with Muggins in 1992.  For seventeen years, she and I began our days with walks.  Ducky is now following in Muggins’ paw steps.

Dogs are great walking companions, not to mention motivational trainers.  You don’t get to “be lazy and skip walking” when you have a dog … unless you have the capacity to resist that wide-eyed, tilted head, expectantly wagging tail thing they do next to the back door.

The only thing dogs can’t do when you walk with them is talk to you.  Which is a good thing … because it creates the opportunity for virtual conversation. (more…)

Share on Facebook

I announced yesterday that I’ve found the place of exhilaraxation, even in the face of a contrary what is.  This is new for me.  But not so much for my husband, Tim.

Tim has been in this place for months.

Tim has felt like he already has what he wants.  So he wants nothing.  He decided he could have it, became it, and has been a happy camper ever since.

In other words, he’s in Abraham-Hicks’ “vortex.”  He’s aligned with all he is and with all he desires.

So, asked a friend the other night, “Why hasn’t he won his lottery yet?  Why doesn’t he have lots of money?  Why hasn’t it worked yet?”

I used to agonize over this question.  It gave me fits.

When I asked Tim the question, he said, “I refuse to go there.  It turns my boat upstream”

He’s right, of course.

But how do you NOT ask that question?

We’re practicing all this good feeling stuff in order to get what we want, right?

Well … yes and no.

We practice feeling good in order to get what we want.  But we want what we want because we believe it will make us feel good.  So actually, if you think about it, we’re really just practicing feeling good in order to feel good.

When I keep this in mind, I have no need to ask the question, “Why hasn’t it worked yet?”

And if I do ask it, I can now answer, “It HAS worked … because I feel good!”

Abraham-Hicks say that if you have 100 things that you want and you never speak or think about those things but you put all your attention on one thing that makes you feel good, all 100 things MUST come to you.

Why?

It is LAW … the law of attraction.  The law of attraction must bring us that which we desire when we are a match to it.  The ONLY thing keeping us from all we desire is resistance.  We know we’re feeling resistance when we feel negative emotion.

Remember I am what I am?  My inner being BECOMES what I desire the minute I desire it.  All I have to do is get into alignment with it, and I do that by feeling like I already have what I want, which ultimately is feeling good.

So by focusing on one thing that feels great, we have gotten what we want.

It has worked!

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.

Share on Facebook

Uninspired doing is a total waste of time.  I know this.  I’ve learned this the very slow, very hard, very long way.

What do you do, though, when all your action choices seem unpalatable and doing nothing doesn’t feel right either?

For example, over the last couple months, I’ve known that doing nothing about my financial situation didn’t feel good at all.  Tim feels fine about that.  He’s so sure money will flow to us that he could spend his days watching the clouds float by and be as happy as a dog running on the beach.

Me?  Nope.  I don’t have the knowing that he has.

My path of least resistance is to do SOMETHING that could lead to an income for us.  Tim’s okay with that too.  (He’s pretty darn good at getting easy.)

So for a month, I bid on a bunch of freelance projects.  HATED it.  Did it anyway.  Never landed a single job.  No wonder.  My alignment sucked.

I batted about a bunch of ideas. None felt all that good.

I finally landed on the idea of revamping my novel writing e-book package and sales page and promoting it.  This idea felt a little better.  Not great, mind you.  But better.

It felt good enough to start moving forward with it.

Now, of course, my first choice is to write a novel.  Or better yet enjoy Tim’s lottery winnings and just focus on blogging.

I deliberately walked away from internet marketing two years ago; I never thought I’d be doing it again.  It’s not something I feel that great about.

But between that and working for pennies to write articles on subjects I have no interest in, the e-book marketing won out.  And so I moved forward.  I wasn’t having a good time.

Thoughts about the project kept pushing good thoughts out of my head. I noticed that instead of thinking about our house on ocean view acreage in Oregon, I was thinking about sales conversion rates and search engine optimization and website stats.  Not good.  I hate that stuff.

So I stopped.  And I asked, how could I make this project more interesting and fun?

It took a few days, but I came up with the idea of creating a series of audios to go with the e-book package.  Writing the audio scripts and recording them sounds like fun.

So NOW I feel good about what I’m doing.

Within this story I just told, do you see the two choices you have when an action you think you must take doesn’t appeal to you?

Kenny Rogers sings, in The Gambler, “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.”  He was singing about cards, but it applies to action journeys too.

Fold ‘Em

If the action you’re taking feels truly lousy and you hate every minute of it, STOP.  Fold ‘em. Walk away.

Sometimes, you may walk away and never go back.  As with my freelance job search, you may find that once you turn away from the resistance you were creating by trying to do something you hated, you attract another opportunity to replace what you didn’t want to do.  Or, as with my e-book revamp, you see something that was there already in a totally different way.  You don’t have access to great ideas from a place of resistance and “I hate this.”

Sometimes, when you walk away for just awhile, your energy shifts enough to go back and do the “hated” task with a different attitude.  By walking away, you get access to a better feeling place that then attracts a more relaxed way of facing the task.

Abraham-Hicks says, “If there is something that you have to do, resist the temptation to do it under duress. Ask yourself, ‘What’s the worst thing that would happen if I didn’t do this?’ And if you can get away with not doing it at all, don’t do it. And then imagine what would it feel like to have this done. Spend a day or two, if you can, just 15 minutes here, 5 minutes here, 2 minutes here, here and here, imagining it completed in a way that pleases you! And then, the next time you decide that you’re going to take action about it, the action is going to be a whole lot easier.”

Hold ‘Em

When a poker player holds a hand, what is he focused on?  The cards in the hand that do him no good?  No.  He’s focused on what he thinks could be the winning cards.  He’s focused on the pair or the full house or the straight.  The cards in his hand that don’t make up the potential win are unimportant to him.

This is how you must look at a task that you’re going to go ahead and do.  Find what’s good about it.

This is what I did with my e-book marketing action.  I looked for, and thanks to law of attraction, found something about it that appealed to me.  And now, when I think about it, I focus on the fun aspects and refuse to give thought to the aspects I’m not crazy about.

There’s always a way to take action that feels good.

Abraham-Hicks once offered the example of a woman whose husband is in the hospital dying.  She’s been at his side for days and days. She’s exhausted and sad and scared.  She understands her energy though, and she knows she needs to find reasons to feel good if she’s to help her husband at all.  He doesn’t “believe in” this vibrational stuff so he’s feeling sorry for himself and he’s depressed and scared.

This woman wants to stay away from the hospital.  She wants a day to do something that feels good.  But if she does that, the guilt will ruin any “feel good” she might find.

If she goes the hospital, she knows she’ll feel resentful and angry and she’ll get sucked into her husband’s negativity.

Which is her path of least resistance?  She can’t fold ‘em because she’s not willing to walk away from her husband.

Abraham-Hicks suggested that she go to the hospital for just a couple hours.  They suggested that she find something that makes her feel good to share with her husband (a book or magazine or whatever) and when she feels like she really needs to leave, she tells her husband how much she loves him and she leaves to enjoy the rest of her day.

It’s like that bit of sunshine peeking through the wee hole.  When you can’t comfortably give up on some action, you find an aspect of it that feels good and hold on to that aspect the way a gambler would hold onto a royal flush.  You, “Clean It Up.”

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.

Share on Facebook

All week, I’ve been thinking about Mexican food.  I’ve wanted cheese enchiladas, refried beans, and rice.  I wanted to go out to eat, but that’s not something I’m going to spend my money on at this point.  Tim mentioned earlier this week that he wanted cheese enchiladas too.

Night before last, my friend, Kathy, called and said she and her partner were taking us out for Mexican food the next day.  No arguments.

How about that?  Tim and I both had cheese enchiladas, refried beans, and rice.  We manifested what we wanted in less than a week.  Kathy and Lyn have never taken us out to eat before, so this wasn’t a usual occurrence.

Two days ago, I offhandedly asked Tim, “What happened to all those Wiffle golf balls Ducky used to play with?”  (These were plastic golf balls with holes in them, and Tim gave her five to play with when we first got her in October.  She loved to toss them up in the air and pounce on them.)  Tim said, “They’re probably under the sofa or something.”

This morning, I got up a lot earlier than I normally do.  Because I got up so early, I took Ducky to the forest and let Tim sleep in.  When we got home, I had to take her in our exercise room, where we have a TV and an office chair in addition to our exercise stuff, because she kept trying to scratch on the bedroom door to wake up her Daddy.  Confining Ducky to that room is something Tim’s been doing since we got Ducky.  Not one time in the four months we’ve had her have I been the one to hang out in there with her.  He does it for me because he gets up earlier.

So I’m sitting on the floor with Ducky, and I’m watching the Olympics on TV (an old console TV that sits on the floor), and I spot a Wiffle golf ball under the TV.  I get it out and, in the process, find another one.

Delighted, Ducky starts playing with them.  She tosses one behind a trunk.  I move the trunk, and I find a third one.

Interesting manifesting, huh?

And one more …

Two days ago, I was talking to Tim about something, and I used the cliché, “The proof is in the pudding.”  Since Tim doesn’t remember anything before 2006, most clichés are foreign to him, so I asked him if he knew what that meant.  He said he had heard that one and he did know what it meant.

A half hour after this conversation, I was reading something on the internet, something that included the phrase, “the proof is in the pudding.”

I hadn’t said or read or heard that cliché in years, and there it was, twice in a half hour.

If I can manifest these things, then can’t I manifest money?

One of my favorite Abraham-Hicks quotes is:

“It is as easy to create a castle as a button. It’s just a matter of whether you’re focused on a castle or a button.”

Apparently, I’ve been focused on buttons, not castles.

After thinking about the pep-talk I got from my friend a couple days ago, I decided I really haven’t been living the Abraham-Hicks principles.  I spend too much time thinking about what shoulda happened, coulda happened, woulda happened.  I lament and I worry.

I am not thinking about being the joyful lottery winner I want to be.  I’m not thinking about being the successful writer I want to be.

I’m thinking about my current situation.

So of course, I’ll perpetuate it.

I think the reason I can create Mexican dinners, Wiffle golf balls, and clichés is that I focus on them with a pureness of thought that doesn’t include worry and doubt.  I don’t agonize over these things.  I think about them and then I let go.

Abraham-Hicks calls this “the art of allowing.”  We don’t have to hammer this stuff into place.  We just have to allow it, and the way we do that is by aligning with our nonphysical self, i.e., by feeling good.

Earlier this week, I was doing some research on law of attraction because I was pondering putting more focus on this blog, and I read several articles and websites about it.  I discovered there’s a lot of misinformation out there about how it works.

For example, a writer on ehow.com said the law of attraction is a belief.  It’s not a belief.  It’s a law, a universal law, like the law of gravity.  It works whether you believe it or not.

Today, I received an e-mail from a law of attraction writer.  He suggested that in deliberate manifestation, you need to start small.  He says if you don’t have 100 percent belief, the universe “will be confused by the vibes that you are putting out.”  Huh?  The universe doesn’t get confused.  It just matches up vibrations.

So it’s not about believing per se, it’s about how you feel.  When you’re “ahead of your beliefs,” trying to manifest something you don’t think is possible, you get frustrated, tense, worried, etc.  These feelings are the indication that you are not in alignment with your inner being.  When you’re not in alignment with your inner being, you cannot manifest what you desire.

The universe KNOWS what we desire, and it’s happy to bring it us when we’re a vibrational match to it.  To be a vibrational match, we have to be aligned with our inner being, i.e, we have to feel good.

Personally, it doesn’t make me feel good to limit what I can manifest.  I like thinking about the big stuff.  But then again, when I don’t believe it’s possible, I feel bad.  I can feel the distance between what I want and what I’m thinking about what I want.

I think that’s why I can so easily create Mexican food and plastic golf balls and clichés and I’ve yet to create money.  For the former, there’s no distance between my desire and what I’m thinking about those desires.  I have no resistance to those desires.  For the latter, I have tons of distance.  I want it but I’m too busy looking at the evidence of not having it.  Huge resistance there.

So I’m still figuring this stuff out.  But I’m recommitting to my experiment.  I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t.

Share on Facebook