Keep Swimming
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010It’s done.
Or not.
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.
I deemed my blog, Dogging the Words, complete enough to be revealed. We uploaded promotional videos to our new Dogging the Words You Tube Channel.
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:
Fast Tube by Casper
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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