The Secret Is Wags

I’ve visualized and visualized and visualized, and do you know of the million and one things I’ve visualized how many have actually happened in my life?  Oh, let’s see, maybe 20 or 30.

I used to teach visualization to writers in writing workshops.  I truly thought it would help writers achieve success.

And I wasn’t totally wrong about that.

Visualization can have great results.

BUT it can also make things worse.

A couple years ago, after I read The Secret and dove back into all my Abraham-Hicks books and tapes, I started visualizing like a mad woman.  I set aside an hour a day to visualize.  I also created a massive “Manifestation Board.”  I’m sure you’ve heard of these; it’s a more physical form of visualization.  You put pictures of things you want up on a bulletin board.

Ours was in our exercise room.  Since I spent at least an hour a day in there, doing physical action without a whole lot of mental requirement to it, I figured it made sense to have a wall full inspirational images to stare at.  Pictures of ocean view homes, huge checks, thin people, big RVs, beautiful vacation destinations, and clippings about lottery winners plastered the wall.  My life as I wanted it to be.

Two years after I put the pictures up, I took them all down and put them away.  I was disgusted with them.  Not a single thing from that wall had manifested in my life.

I stopped visualizing an hour a day too.  Nothing I’d visualized had manifested either.  In fact, I’d manifested the OPPOSITE of what I’d been focusing on.

Why?

This baffled me for a long time.  But I think I know the answer.

Visualization—either in the mind or on a board—isn’t the great law of attraction tool all the law of attraction coaches and authors and teachers say it is.

It CAN be.  But only if you do it right.

I wasn’t doing it right.

Most people aren’t.

What was I doing wrong?

I was doing the “Push Up Version” of visualization.

Push Up Visualization

Say hi to Ducky.

In the above picture, Ducky wants to manifest her dinner.  I’ve trained Ducky to either “sit” and “stay” or lie “down” and “stay” before she gets to eat.  I put her food in her feeding station, give her the command to sit or lie down, and she is to wait until I say, “Okay,” before she dives into her food.

Before I took the picture, I gave Ducky, the “down” command.  Notice that she’s not in a very impressive down.  It’s a little tough to tell from the picture’s angle, but she’s actually in a push up position. She’s holding her upper body about two inches off the ground.  She’s not in full down.  When she does this, I don’t release her to her food.

I say to her a second time, “down” and usually add “all the way down.” She squeaks (I think she’s part mouse), and squirms lower to the floor.  THEN I say “Okay,” and she “manifests” her food.

The push up position Ducky gets into is a perfect illustration of what we do when we mess up visualization.  It shows how we aren’t FULLY in the visualization.

To be fully in a visualization, you can’t look at an imagined scene or a picture from outside of the scene or the picture.  In other words, you can’t look at it from a place of I’m over here having what I currently have, but I WANT this thing I’m thinking of or what’s in this picture on my wall.

I talked about the post, By Jove.  We can’t WANT something and get it.  We have to feel like we have it in order to get it.

All the visualization I did was Push Up Visualization.  It was half-done.  I thought about doing the things I wanted to do, and I looked at pictures of what I wanted to do but I never got to the point where I truly felt like I already had done and had become what I wanted to do and be.  I never did All The Way Down Visualization.

And how do you do that?

All The Way Down Visualization

I’m not a whiz at All The Way Down Visualization yet, so bear with me.  I’ve been playing with it over the last few days.  The best way I can describe this form of visualization, a form that I’m hypothesizing may be what we need, is this way:  It’s not about seeing yourself in a specific situation that you want, it’s about seeing yourself doing something that in the moment you’re visualizing it makes you feel good.

An example.  I have spent hours visualizing house hunting for our ocean view home in Oregon.  Most of the time I visualized doing this, I wasn’t feeling all that great.  Why?  Because I was acutely aware that I wasn’t in Oregon and had no real plans to house hunt for my ocean view home. I wasn’t fully in the visualization.  Even when I got myself into a relaxed state of mind, some part of me was aware that I was doing this visualization because I WANTED something.  Think about it.  Would I set aside an hour to visualize something I already had?

I don’t visualize Springer spaniels.  I already have one.  I don’t visualize meeting a man.  I have a husband I love and who loves me.  The very act of visualization has inherent in it the lack of that which we visualize.

I had the same feelings when I looked at the manifestation board.  When I looked at the pictures, I was far more aware that I didn’t have these things than I was of any good feelings about having them.

I think the main problem I had with visualization and that you may be having too is that the visualization itself is actually activating the awareness that we don’t have what we want.  It’s not putting us IN alignment with what we want.  It’s getting us OUT of alignment of what we want.

Visualization can be kind of like a prescription drug.  It can help, but it can also do a whole lot of hurt if it’s not used correctly.

I think all the visualizing I did, because it was Push Up Visualization, made my situation worse.

I do think that All The Way Down visualization could be effective, but I’ll be honest.  I don’t think I’m that good at it.

So what to do?  Do I keep attempting to visualize properly or not?

Today, the law of attraction brought me an answer to this question.  It brought me a memory of a process I did years ago that HAD a powerful impact on my life.  I’d forgotten all about it.

I’ll share that process with you tomorrow.

In the meantime, think about your visualization.  Are you doing Push Up Visualization or All The Way Down Visualization?

What has your experience with this been?

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For a long time, I was confused about action’s role in how law of attraction works.  My understanding of Abraham-Hicks’ teachings led me to conclude that attracting what we want is a vibrational, thought process, not an action process.  But everywhere I turned, I encountered law of attraction and The Secret teachers saying that you can’t think your way to what you want.  Who was right?

A couple weeks ago, I asked my new friend, Karen, the wise writer who blogs about Abraham-Hicks teachings on Abraham Fun, what her take was on the action/thought issue.  She wrote a great post about it that confirmed my conclusion:  it’s all about thought, NOT action.

We are so trained to focus on action though.  Our parents, teachers, and society as a whole so encourage us to always be DOING something, in fact, that we feel bad when we’re not.

We have all sorts of words for not being in action:  lazy, procrastinate, do nothing, slack off, writer’s block.  None of these words have positive connotations.

We prefer to be productive, go-getters, doers, and proactive.

In order to encourage ourselves to think more and DO less (unless it’s inspired action), we need a better way to think about stillness.

Writer Brenda Ueland, author of If You Want to Write:  A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit, did something to help with that.  She created the word, “moodling.”  She wrote, “So you see, imagination needs moodling ^_ long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”

I read Ueland’s book about 15 years ago.  Her description of moodling changed my life.

I was raised by a woman who taught me to “be productive.”  My mother simply isn’t comfortable being still.  Growing up,  the only time it was okay for me to be still was when I was sick.  No wonder I got sick a lot.

When I was in therapy in my 20s, my therapist gave me homework:  I was to leave my bed unmade.

What??!??

This simply wasn’t done!

I was a different woman then.  Power suits and perfect hair and nails and pumps that matched my purses and lots of orderly lists and goals and standards that I never reached and never lived up to.  It was tough, but I left my bed unmade.  It was a baby step toward shedding the skin I’d never been comfortable in.

I had changed by the time I encountered Ueland’s moodling a decade later, but I still felt guilty when I “did nothing.” Ueland changed the way I thought about being still.  I embraced moodling and started thinking of all my “unproductive” time as essential to my writing career.

Now I’m even more excited about moodling.

Moodling is more than a technique to enhance imagination.  It’s a launch pad that can rocket us into the vortex.

The truth is that we’re never doing nothing.  We’re energy.  We’re constantly vibrating.  We’re always doing something because our energy is always in motion.  Every thought is “productive.”

The only question is whether we’re producing something we want or something we don’t want.  When we focus more on physical action than on nonphysical moodling, we often sacrifice aligned thought in the process.

So here’s to moodling more and doing less.

Have you moodled today?

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I’m not the only person gathering law of attraction evidence. Here are a couple great law of attraction evidence stories from readers:

A Bike

Stacey visualized herself riding a bike, which was something she did often a couple of years ago, and has been missing lately. Shortly after she began visualizing riding again, her friend called and asked if Stacey wanted her bike back. She had completely forgotten that her friend had it!

So often, we already have what we need. We just don’t think to look at what we already have.

Nepal

Another reader chatted with a cashier in a deli. She asked the cashier where he was from. He said he was from Nepal and talked a little of his people. She was intrigued and wanted to know more. She decided to google Nepal when she got home. But when she booted up her computer and checked her e-mail, she found the latest issue of her New York Times travel subscription. The main article in this issue? It was on Nepal, of course.

Notice that this woman never took action to get what she wanted, which was information on Nepal. Many law of attraction teachers, especially those featured in The Secret, say you have to take action to activate the law of attraction. Abraham-Hicks disagrees, and if you pay attention to law of attraction evidence, you see that Abraham-Hicks is right. Attracting what you desire is a mental journey, not a physical one.

Here are a couple more of my little bits of evidence:

Boone’s Wine (3/20/10)

Friday evening, when Tim and I were sitting by a beach fire chatting with our friends, Lyn and Kathy, we talked about alcohol and drinking. Tim doesn’t drink, so Lyn and Kathy were asking him if he ever did. Of course, he doesn’t remember, but he’d told me before his memory wipe that he tried it twice when he was in the Army and wasn’t impressed.

Lyn, Kathy, and I then started talking about things we drank in college. We were reminiscing about bad wine, and Lyn mentioned Boone’s Farm apple wine.

Last night, Tim and I watched the movie, Juno. At one point, one of the characters mentions Boone’s wine.

I haven’t thought about Boone’s Farm wine in years and years, and there was a reference twice in two days.

Beaver (3/21/10)

Tim was watching golf. On the TV, Padraig Harrington was putting. Tim said, “There’s your favorite beaver.” Padraig (and if he ever reads this, I don’t mean this with any malice) looks very much like a cute beaver when he concentrates on a shot because of the way he bares his front upper teeth.

We were playing Scrabble at the time. Tim took his turn. I looked down at my letters, and guess what six of them spelled? B-E-A-V-E-R.

This, I’m discovering, is what it’s like to be in what Abraham-Hicks calls the vortex. It’s a magical place here.

And the better we feel, the better we feel. And the more evidence we see, the more evidence we get.

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If you followed the Olympics, you know that the U.S. won the four-man bobsleigh competition, bringing home gold in that event for the first time in 62 years.  The bobsleigh’s driver was Steve Holcomb.

Two years ago, Holcomb was on the verge of retiring from the sport because of severe vision problems.  He was losing his sight, and nothing was helping.

Then he found out about an experimental surgery, and he decided to go for it.  The surgery worked.  He ended up with 20/20 vision.

Great, right?

Sure.

But Holcomb had just one problem.  He’d been driving his bobsleigh for a very long time with poor vision.  Because of this, he’d learned to drive by feel more than by sight.

So when his vision returned to 20/20, it messed up his driving.  Being able to see impeded his bobsleigh performances.

Go figure.

So Holcomb scratched up his goggles so his vision wouldn’t be so clear.  This allowed him to go back to feeling his way down the track more than seeing it.

This story inspires me for two reasons.  First, it’s a great example of how the universe will bring you what you need (in Holcomb’s case, a new surgery that did what nothing else had been able to do).

Second, and more important, it suggests that visualizing what we want isn’t nearly as important as feeling it.

Law of attraction teachers, especially those in The Secret, make a big deal out of visualizing.  We’re taught to see what we want, and we’re taught to put pictures of what we want on a bulletin board.

And this works … IF you also feel the way you want to feel when you look at the pictures or see the images in your mind.

I’ve been visualizing for years and years.  Some of what I’ve visualized has happened.  Most hasn’t.

Why hasn’t visualization worked as well as I’d have liked it to?

The answer lies in feeling more than seeing.

Abraham-Hicks says:

“Do you have to change your vibration on a particular subject in order to let it in? No, you don’t. You could pet your pet and let it in. You could sit with your feet dangling in the bay, and let it in. If it is a subject that you often think of in an attitude of resistance, it is really worthwhile reaching for some thoughts that feel better. You could launch an intention and never think about it again, and the Universe would yield it to you. You don’t have to clean up your vibration relative to anything, if you can just not think about it any more. That’s why we teach meditation. It’s easier to teach you to have no thought than to have pure positive thought. When you quiet your mind you stop thought; when you stop thought you stop resistance; when you stop resistance–then you are in a state of allowing.”

In other words, visualizing can be counterproductive if what you’re visualizing brings up resistant thoughts and feelings.

I think this explains my lack of results with regard to selling my recent manuscripts and winning lotteries.  Although I visualize these events many times throughout the day, I have resistance about these things.  The resistance is my fear that they won’t happen and my longing for them happening.

Holcomb’s experience has confirmed my belief that I need to be more concerned with how I feel than I am with what I’m visualizing.

And the experiment continues …..

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One more bit of wisdom from my friend, Melanie, the distance healer:

When she and I spoke the other day, she told me she thought much of our problems in manifesting what we want lay in our desire to make things unfold in a specific way.  In other words, we try and manhandle the details.

We want to orchestrate how things unfold down to the nitty-gritty minutia of it all.  Author Neville, who wrote The Neville Reader, a law of attraction primer that was way ahead of The Secret, said that our job is to decide what we want and then feel as if it has already happened.

It’s that simple.  We just need to live FROM what we want, not INTO what we want. We get hung up, he said, when we try and figure out how it’s all going to come together.

We are not responsible for the details.  That’s the Universe’s job.  All we have to do is hold a vision of what we want and stay in alignment with our inner being, our Nonphysical self, so we can vibrate on a match with our desire.

This is what I’ve failed to do for some time.  I’ve gotten caught up in the details.

I want to feel financial freedom, creative success, joy, and security.  Instead of just finding ways to feel those things now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get them, and I’ve been glomming onto Tim’s vision of winning the lottery and agonizing over it.  Or I’ve been deciding the way to get money is with freelancing and then agonizing over it.

No more.

I am delighted by the money I currently have.  I am enjoying my days as they are.  And I want to expand on that and feel riches and joy.

It can come to me in whatever way is best for me.

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Earlier this week, I was poking around the internet looking to see if anyone else out there is testing Abraham-Hicks teachings.  I came across an e-how article that suggested you test the law of attraction by trying to manifest a blue feather.

I think this is profoundly silly and lousy advice.  Yes, some guy in The Secret manifested a distinctive feather, so I get inspiration for the idea.

But you’re not so much testing the law of attraction as you’re testing your ability to align with something.  And it’s difficult to get excited about something you don’t really want all that much.  The good feelings required to achieve alignment with a desire come from the exuberant expectation of fulfilling the desire.  I don’t know about you—but blue feathers don’t do that much for me.

I’d rather focus on something I really want.  Because I have resistance I need to work through on the subjects of the lottery, selling my latest books, etc., I’m going for something I feel a little more relaxed about:  manifesting $2000.  I’m starting there.

I’m thinking about how fun it will be to start to see myself matching up with my desires, and $2000 is a good place to start.

I think if we’re going to test our ability to manifest things, we should pick something we really want, and if we need to start small, fine, but we should still make it something we want.

Want to try it yourself?  Pick some little thing you’d like and think about how great it will be to have it.  Then make it your priority to find reasons to feel good.

Let me know what happens.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all become what Abraham-Hicks calls Deliberate Creators?

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This morning, Tim and Ducky and I went on our walk, as usual.  It was a slightly drippy morning—a few squalls moving through and the leftovers from yesterday’s steady rain dripping from the trees.  We had a great hour and ten minute or so walk and were heading back to the car.

Tim reached into his pocket for Ducky’s leash.

It was gone.

The leash we carry in the forest is a simple nylon lead that Ducky’s grandpa (my stepdad) gave her for Christmas.  It’s a John Deere leash.  My dad got it because he has a John Deere riding lawn mower that he treats like a treasured sports car and a John Deere hat that he loves to wear (he’s 80 years old—it’s his idea of hip attire).

The leash was perfect for walks because it was small and tucked into a pocket and was just enough to control her at the start and end of our walks, at the trailhead near the street.

When we realized it was missing, Tim said he and Ducky would retrace our path and try to find it.  One pass through the whole forest takes about half an hour at the pace we usually walk.  Tim can go faster (since my ankle injury, I don’t move the way I used to), so I planted myself on a bench in the forest clearing and waited.

The bench, by the way, is lovely.  It’s a wooden bench with a verdigris cast iron rose-patterned back.  It bears a dedication plaque that reads, “Hilda Marion Glover, 1924-2007, Sit and Hear the Silence.”  The greatest gift we can expect from life, I think, is to be loved as much as someone obviously loved Hilda Glover.

I was having a little trouble finding a feel good place before I sat on the bench … for reasons not worth going into (they come under the heading of NI).  But as I sat there, an umbrella shielding me from the tree’s drips, my ears tuned into the forest’s pattering music, I felt myself finding alignment with the greater part of me—my nonphysical self.

I started playing out virtual scenarios in my head.  I ran them like little movies:  my agent calls on Tuesday to tell me she finally read my book, loves it, and plans to start submitting it to editors this week; a different agent calls and tells me she loves Puppies Interrupted and manages to sell it quickly, to the same editor who worked on Marley and Me, for a six-figure advance; Tim wins a lottery Tuesday evening, and we go see an attorney the next day to find out how best to handle the money; we move to Oregon and fix up an ocean-view house; we take a trip down the coast in September to celebrate the day Tim proposed, and he plays the Pebble Beach golf course ….

The longer I sat there visualizing these wonderful scenes, the better I felt.

Once in awhile, I’d find myself feeling not as good.  I’d check what I was thinking and realize my mind had wandered back into “what is” instead of “what I want.”  I’d poke my mind, and move it on to something better.

I sat there for 25 minutes.  Suddenly, Ducky burst from the trees and tore down the path toward me.  We had a tail-wagging reunion.  Tim said he didn’t find the leash.

We walked the circuit together again (Ducky got a 2 hour and 15 minute walk this morning) and still didn’t find the leash.  Someone must have picked it up.  Sigh.  I hope they enjoy it.

Tim said maybe it was a sign.  When we move to Oregon, we plan to get Ducky an Oregon Ducks (University of Oregon) leash, so maybe we lost this one to make way for the other one.  It’s a nice theory.

I miss the leash, but I enjoyed my sit.  Because I had nothing else to do while I waited for Tim, I really had a chance to focus my thought.

I wonder whether just sitting and finding scenarios that feel good is more productive than DOING things that don’t feel good.

I’ve heard The Secret gurus say that you can’t sit around waiting for something good to happen.  One of the speakers/writers quoted in that book (I forget which one) says that if you sit around waiting for money to come, you’ll find yourself sitting on the curb, homeless.

Abraham-Hicks might take issue with that.  They say that action is great, when it’s inspired, but action isn’t necessarily required to get what we want.  It’s not what we do. It’s how we’re aligned.

I was aligned in the forest today.  I could feel it.

I want to feel like that more often.

I’d like to have the courage to do that instead of doing the logical things to make money.

I’m moving closer to that courage (thanks in large part to a great new friend who sends me wonderful, encouraging e-mails—in fact, I need to add that to my “I love …” list:

Paz’s e-mails

Maybe my new motto needs to be “Sit and Hear the feel good thoughts.”

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Few people have tried harder than I have.  I’ve been charging after writing and financial success for two decades.  I’ve written millions of words.  I’ve amassed over 2000 rejection letters.  I’ve sold short stories, poetry, greeting card copy, essays, columns, books, and e-books.  I’ve written web articles, newsletters.  I’ve build dozens of websites and free reports and e-zines.  I’ve taken thousands and thousands of dollars worth of training and courses, not to mention the thousands more I spent getting my B.A. and law degree ….

My point is that I haven’t been sitting around on my currently rather ample ass all my life.  When I have a problem, I don’t whine about it—I DO something to try and solve it.  When I want something, I don’t just daydream about it.  I go after it.

Ever since I started selling my writing, I’ve met a lot of people who say they want to be writers.  It’s amazing the number of people who want to write.

Humans love to ask each other, “So what do you do?” [translation:  how do you make money?]  Back when I was a lawyer, when I answered that question with, “I’m a lawyer,” no one ever said to me, “I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer.”  In fact, what I usually got in response to that answer was a lawyer joke … how many lawyers does it take to…….  Anyway, after I became a published author and I answered that question with, “I’m a writer,” at least half the people I met (or more) said to me, “I’ve always thought I had a book in me,” or “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.”

A few years ago, I made a new friend who told me she wanted to be a writer but after trying it, she got discouraged with the rejection.  I asked, “How many rejections did you get?”

She said, “One.”

I just stared at her.

She said, “I don’t take criticism well.”

No kidding.

So this woman wanted to be a writer, but she spent her days surfing the internet and reading books.  She actually had some talent (I read some of her stuff), but she never did anything with it.

When she asked me for advice, I said, “Write.”  If you want to be a writer, you have to WRITE, a lot.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t write.

I know I’ve wandered off course, here, but I do have a point.

I have tried HARD to achieve the success and financial freedom I want.  I have made goal lists, created vision boards and binders, written letters to God, angels, and the universe.  I have visualized and affirmed.  I have read literally hundreds of books on how to have a great life.  I have WORKED to get what I want.

And here I am with dwindling funds, not nearly the success I’ve desired, and I’m finally realizing that the secret to getting what you want may not just be visualizing it then going for it.  The secret might be just as easy as what Abraham-Hicks says it is:  feel good.

A couple days ago, the Abraham-Hicks quote was:

“There isn’t anything that I cannot be or do or have, and I have a huge Nonphysical staff that’s ready to assist me, and I’m ready.”

I’m beginning to think that I’ve been underutilizing my “huge Nonphysical staff.”  While I’ve been slogging along with my nose to the grindstone and my eye on the ball (and as my stepfather says, “How is anyone supposed to get anything done in that position?”), my Nonphysical staff has been playing volleyball on the beach and drinking fruity cocktails with little umbrellas in them.  I’ve been trying to do all this stuff myself.  How dumb is that?  It’s like the CEO of Boeing trying to build the airplanes while the engineers and machinists build mobiles out of rivets.

As I’m going after freelancing jobs, I’m getting this sense that I’m doing it again—putting in the hard work.

Abraham says that it doesn’t matter what you’re doing—you have to “get easy” about it.

So as I find myself starting to obsess over DOING the right things to get the work I want (actually I don’t want the work at all—I have so many other things I’d rather be doing; I want the MONEY), I am catching myself and wondering, what if it’s easier than we think? What if this whole nose to the grindstone, pull yourself up by the bootstraps (I don’t even HAVE bootstraps … or a grindstone for that matter), “no pain, no gain” crap that our parents, teachers, and the media has brainwashed into believing is just plain wrong?

What if it really is easy?

What if being easy, feeling good, is all it takes to have what you want?

The other day, a good friend of mine said to me, “Well, you know you can’t just sit around feeling good about something and expect it to come to you.  You have to DO something after you feel good.  That’s what The Secret said.”

I said, “Mm hm.”

But I don’t KNOW this.  In fact, I’m starting to think the whole DOING is highly overrated.

Of course, I don’t feel totally confident about this, which is why I’m doing the freelance job search.  But I AM doing it with a different attitude.  I’m still telling it like it isn’t.  In my mind, I’m a lottery winner, a very happy, free lottery winner with all the time I need.  I’m looking for things that are FUN to do.

This morning, after I slept in until nine (heavenly), I got up and walked in the forest for an hour and a half (more heavenly).  I watched Ducky play with her friend, Dixie (if you don’t smile when you see happy dogs playing, you might want to turn yourself into NASA and get tested for alien infestation).  Tim and I made whole wheat pancakes for breakfast (which we ate about noon).  Then our friend, Lyn, called and asked, “Can Ducky come out to play?”  We met her and her dog, Jake (Ducky’s best friend), at the park and watched them play for a half hour.

Now Ducky is snoozing on her bed in front of the fire.  Tim and I are playing Scrabble.  Outside, the day is peaceful and crisp.  I’m totally and completely relaxed because I’m a lottery winner (in my virtual reality).

This is the experiment, and I am ready to prove my hypothesis:  feeling good (the human equivalent to tail wags) is the secret to getting what you want.

I have sent my Nonphysical staff out to bring me the physical money that matches my lottery winner state of mind.  And if it’s going to take a little time to get that, they can bring me a freelance job to keep Ducky in dog treats until the REAL winnings come in.

I am the happy executive of my life … ready to move onto EASY street.

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The lab is still closed, barred by crime scene tape now.  All that’s left of Ms. Feel Good is a chalk outline on the floor.

At the moment, the murder suspects are Anger, Fear, and Pathetic … oh, and Too Much Left Brain is in the running too.

Here’s where my left brain has hung me up:

In order to believe in this experiment, to start it up again and stay committed to it, I have to believe in the premise underlying the experiment.  Like I’ve said in past posts, I don’t have all the time in the world to mess around with this.  I have two months, and I need to use them well.

So if I’m not going to use those two months to do the logical things—i.e, DO (take physical action) whatever it takes to bring money in, I have to believe that the nonphysical path of feeling good to align myself with source energy to vibrate into a match with what I want (ala Abraham-Hick’s teachings), is a viable option.

And there’s one little problem with me believing this.

My husband, Tim, as I’ve mentioned, absolutely KNOWS he’s going to win a lottery.  He feels like he’s already won one.  He says he feels relaxed and exhilarated at the same time (we coined a new word for that—exhileraxation).  When he walks in the public forest here in our town, in his mind, he’s walking on our own property, the property we want to buy when he wins that lottery.  He has no money worries at all.  He doesn’t live in our “reality.”  He lives in his own.

This is exactly what you need to do to create a vibrational match with something you want—you have to find the place of feeling like you already have it.

Abraham-Hicks aren’t the only teachers who say this.  Neville wrote about it in the 1950’s and 60’s.  It was in The Secret. Lottery winner, Cynthia Stafford’s inspiration, author Joseph Murphy teaches this.

Friday evening, our good friends came over (I will call them Tilly and Pam).  We talked about the law of attraction and the role of energy vibration in creating your reality.  Pam asked me if I’ve read any of Gregg Braden’s books.  I have:  The Divine Matrix—Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief. She says she was listening to one of his books on tape, and she’d just listened to him tell the story of visiting the Hopi Indians and going out into the desert with one of the elders in the tribe.  They went out to pray for rain.  The elder went behind a rock and closed his eyes for a few minutes then came back and said it was done.  Braden, who apparently had been expecting some kind of ceremony or dance or something, was surprised and asked what the elder did.  The elder said he simply felt like it had already rained.  He imagined the feel of it on his skin, the smell of it, how the muddy earth felt oozing between his toes.  And sure enough, it rained.

The universe responds to our thought, and when our thought comes from a place of knowing (because we feel like we have what we desire), we match up with the energetic vibration of what we desire and it is ours.  That’s how it works.

But …

Back to where I’m hung up:  Tim has been doing exactly what you’re supposed to do.  Every Abraham-Hicks book I’ve read (I’ve read eight of them) says that once you find alignment with “who you really are” (the nonphysical part of you), as evidenced by your feeling good, you will experience shifts in your life in “just a few days.”  They say that once you have found this alignment that which you do not desire cannot make its way to you.  If you feel rich, you will experience the evidence of this alignment about money in the form of “some financial relief.”

So where is Tim’s financial relief?  Why do we still get creditor phone calls?  Why hasn’t money come his way?  How can he have gotten us in this situation if he feels so rich?

Tim has felt rich for a very long time, so where is his money?

This bugs me.

If you decide to follow a certain path, it’s nice to know that the path goes to where you want it to go.  I wouldn’t, for instance, get on Interstate 5, which runs north and south along the west coast, and expect it to take me to Washington D.C.  I also wouldn’t go on a diet that a friend followed perfectly without experiencing any weight loss at all.

So Tim’s alignment actually bothers me.  He should be experiencing financial shifts by now.  Shouldn’t he?

Tim says he’s not going to pay attention to the fact that his reality hasn’t matched up with his virtual reality yet because the minute he does that, he’s out of alignment.  He’s right.

But (again) …

One way to tell if you’re in alignment is to see what’s manifesting in your life.

Sigh.

A wise friend sent me an e-mail this morning and said I have to let Tim do his thing (win the lottery) while I do mine.  She told me her sister had watched an Oprah show about lottery winners, and one of the winners kept telling his wife he was going to win—she didn’t believe him, but then he did.  So there you go.  She’s write—I even wrote about this in a previous post.

It’s tough, though, to believe in a process that doesn’t seem to be working all that well for the person you’re living with.

So Ms. Feel Good is still in the morgue.  I’m working on ways to resurrect her.  I haven’t found the magic yet …….

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The experiment is perking along.  The scientist is gathering data.  All is well in Labsville.

But then …

The monkey gets out of his cage and frees the rats and the mice.  The rats and the mice turn on all the Bunsen burners.  The animals break the glass and escape.  The flames ignite chemicals in glass vials all over the lab.  Ka-BLAM!  The lab explodes.

What does the scientist do?

She wails and moans (surely).  She cleans up (hopefully).  And she starts over (if she’s determined.

Welcome to my destroyed lab.

I’m somewhere between the wail and moan phase and the clean-up phase.

My lab isn’t a place full of monkeys and rats and mice.  It has no Bunsen burners or vials of chemicals (though certain chemicals could be helpful at this point J).

My lab is life.  And the experiment was:  make my top priority finding reasons to feel good to see if feeling good is the secret to creating the life you desire.

In order to test my hypothesis, one element must be in place.  I MUST feel good.

Yesterday, I stopped feeling good about noon.  I tried to find relief and get back to feeling good.  I stopped and wrote about Ducky.  I used the chi machine.  I had a healthy, yummy meal with Tim and we talked about things we want.

I still didn’t feel better.

I looked around the house at things I appreciate.  I cuddled with Ducky.  Tim and I watched a show that makes us feel good (Extreme Home Makeover).  I still didn’t feel good.

In fact, the more I tried to feel good, the worse I felt.

I was sucked back into the previous year, remembering how I felt at the start of last year, thinking that the year was so filled with promise.  We’d received this great insurance settlement.  We were fixing up the house.  I thought I had months of freedom and time ahead of me to do my writing without pressure.  I thought we were on the verge of something amazing.  Truly, I did.

Then in August, I discovered my sense of freedom was an illusion.  We had no money and all our credit cards were charged to the hilt.  I went from happy and focused to devastated and confused.

Now, we get 10 to 20 creditor calls a day.  They’re like little Red Alert sirens going off in the background, yanking me out of my everything’s-going-to-be-okay place.

The books and screenplays I’ve written are stalled on someone’s desk—no sales yet.

And yes, I know I’m telling it like it is, not like how I want it to be.  Which is why I feel so lousy.

I got hung up on the intentions, I think.  Abraham says to intend your way through your day—they call it segment intending:  decide what you want before you go into each part of your day.  I’ve tried this many times off and on through the last few years.  I’ve yet to have a day go the way I intended it to go.  So I get pissed off (I don’t think that’s part of the process).

Then there’s that placemat process—you put on one side of the page what you’ll absolutely do that day and on the other side of the page, you write down what you want the universe to do.  I’ve done that many times too, and I’ve yet to have the universe do anything on its list.

Still, I’m a determined woman.  So yesterday, I tried again.  I got up and intended that I’d easily find a freelance writing opportunity, one that paid well.  I’d apply and get the job and I’d be on track to make enough money to give us some security while Tim gets himself lined up with that lottery he keeps telling me he feels like he’s won.  I put getting me those jobs on the universe’s side of the to do list.

By late afternoon, I was slogging through 38 pages of how-to-use-Elance so I could take a stupid test on how to use their site, and I was NOT having a good time.  I was having a MISERABLE time.  It didn’t feel good at all.  I tried to find a new attitude.  All new attitudes were in hiding.

Everything came crashing down on me.  This is NOT the life I envisioned.  I’m on the verge of 50 years old.  I’ve worked for 20 years to be a successful writer.  I thought I had it made when I broke into the big publishing world.  I sold books and was sure my career was taking off.  I was wrong.  I threw every bit of my energy into building a business.  I failed.  I thought I understood how to attract what I wanted, and I attracted a freak accident that left me with a permanent limp and an ankle that hurts pretty much all the time.

I’m PISSED OFF!!!!!

Ka-BLAM!  That’s when the lab exploded.

So much for feeling good.

I cried off and on all evening.  Even Ducky’s sweet attempts to comfort me (head on my shoulder, little tail wags, a nose to my neck that said, “I’m here; it’s okay.”) didn’t help.

Abraham and many spiritual writers talk about what Abraham calls “the path of least resistance.”  This means that for all you do, you find the path that feels the best.  Trust your gut, your instinct.  You know when a course of action feels good and when it doesn’t.

But what if neither course of action feels good?  What if you can’t find one that feels good?

There’s where I am.  That’s the monkey that started all the mischief in my lab.

Scrabbling for these writing jobs doesn’t feel good.  Call me a writing snob, but I’ve worked too hard for too long and developed a skill set that is too valuable to be jumping through hoops so I can bid on projects that don’t compensate me well enough.  I HATE the idea.  I HATE the process.  It makes me feel yucky and very, very small.  It makes me feel like a failure.

And yes, I know that nothing can MAKE me feel anything.  So, I’ll rephrase that.  I am allowing myself to feel small and like a failure.

So my other choice is to keep churning out book proposals because I enjoy doing that, even though I know none of these can lead to a sale within the time I need such a sale.  I need money coming in before April to stave off disaster.  The book industry doesn’t move that fast unless you’re a celebrity in the middle of a scandal or a criminal who’s done something heinous and gotten away with it.

So that path doesn’t feel right.

Do I just enjoy myself—return to my drawing and piano playing and walking my dog and taking long baths and trust that Tim won’t let me down?  Believe that he’ll win that lottery?

But I don’t believe that he’ll win in the next two months.  I know it’s POSSIBLE—but do I feel like I can count on it?  No way.  He’s been telling me he’s going to win for over two years.  Why would he finally do it now?

So that path doesn’t feel right.

Are there other paths?  Probably, but I don’t see them now.

Sell the house, move to another place and get a job.  HATE that idea.

I love my house and where I live.  I had this place built to my specifications.  I created this lifestyle.  When I think about leaving it, I feel like I’m going to throw up.  That’s not a feel good path, obviously.

So what is my path of least resistance?  I thought I had it figured out.  Get freelance work.

Yesterday I found out that the path to freelance work doesn’t feel good either.

So I’m stuck.

And that’s why my lab exploded.

My goal was to feel good for 30 days and see what that brought me.  I didn’t even last 11 days.  Experiment tainted.  Data in ashes.

What do I do?

Start over.

I must.

But what’s the path that leads me to that feel good place?

I don’t know yet.

So for right now, I’m moaning and cleaning up.

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