Yes, I know I keep talking about my dogs. But when you live with a being who spends all day everyday in the Vortex, if you don’t pay attention to her attitudes and actions, you’re just plain dumb. Who wouldn’t want to emulate pure joy? (more…)
We all know that the first step to feeling good is getting easy with what is. We must accept where we are if we want to move on from an unpleasant reality.
We know it. But sometimes, it’s a bit of a challenge to do what we know we must do. (more…)
At the end of May, thanks to some serious misalignment, the law of attraction brought to us an uprooted, leaning tree. The “facts” are that a freak wind storm broke off the top of one tree, and that treetop fell into a second, dead tree, knocking it partially over. Surrounding trees caught the dead tree and kept it from going all the way over, but its position was precarious.
The day after the wind storm, we got an estimate for removing the tree. The cost would be $850 … which might as well have been $850,000. We didn’t have the money, and we still don’t.
If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you know that a couple months ago, my “what is” situation was a turmoil. I’d just gotten sued over debt. I had no idea how I was going to pay my bills. We were in danger of losing our house. Blah, blah, blah. The bottom line is that my mind was full of “dead wood thoughts.”
What are dead wood thoughts? They’re “how” thoughts. (more…)
Ducky turns one year old in a week. Hard to believe. I can still close my eyes and feel that warm little ball of wiggles I held in my arms when we brought her home last October. Tim says he vaguely remembers being able to carry her around. She’s now almost 45 pounds of mostly spring-generated muscle.
Since Ducky is my greatest and most consistent source of joy (she’s sort of like a cannon that shoots me into the Vortex), I decided to spend a couple bucks for the props to stage a good Ducky birthday picture for The Joyful Springer (it will be on the site on the 24th). So a few days ago, Tim and I stopped in Wal-mart to get a birthday hat and balloon. (more…)
I have a life-long pattern that I am in the process of breaking.
What I used to do was this Do-not-do-this-at-home-or-anywhere-else Process:
I can vehemently say that this process creates nothing worth talking about. (more…)
In 1996, when I moved to the beach, I bought a book, Drawing For Dummies, because I thought that now that I was going to be a free-spirited divorcee, I would try my hand at art. But I was so busy walking on the beach and writing that the book sat on the shelf. Until 2008.
After my accident in 2008, I spent months off my feet and much of that time, I was on pain meds that clouded my thinking. I didn’t do much writing or reading. Something about my pain or the painkillers or the shock of the accident disconnected me from my usual link with words.
Still, I craved creativity. I wasn’t content to just watch TV or listen to music. I wanted to bring something to life. Law of attraction reminded me of that book on my shelf. (more…)
So there’s this Vortex, to use Abraham-Hicks terminology. It’s an extraordinary font of energy—organized, creational energy that holds everything asked for by everyone.
I think of the Vortex as a sort of energy clearinghouse where everything that’s asked for is given, where every request is put into place in a cooperative way for the good of all who are asking. EVERYTHING asked for, from a better tasting toothpaste to the vastest monetary fortune imaginable, is given in the Vortex.
Obviously, the Vortex is the place to be.
And how do we get there? (more…)
There’s a restaurant north of where Tim and I live called The Ocean Crest. It’s an awesome place—incredible food, romantic atmosphere, attentive service, and a stunning view of the ocean through the veils of graceful hemlock tree branches. We love it, and we go there on special occasions whenever we have the financial means to do so.
We recently mentioned how much we love the place to a couple we know (I’ll call them Jack and Jill). Jill said, “Oh, we went there once. We think it’s highly overrated. The service was so slow.”
“My steak wasn’t done right,” Jack said.
“And it’s so expensive,” Jill said.
“The tables are too close together,” Jack said.
Tim and I moved on to another subject.
The fact is that Jack and Jill make some valid points. The service at The Ocean Crest is quite leisurely. The place is pricey. Once, Tim’s steak wasn’t cooked right. And the tables could be further apart.
So what?
Tim and I don’t talk about those things. We talk about those positive aspects I mentioned at the beginning of this post. And because that’s what we talk about, no matter what happens at that restaurant (slow service, overcooked steaks, etc.), we have an incredible time. We have nothing but delightful memories of our meals there.
We also have delightful memories of every restaurant we eat at. We’ve never had a bad restaurant experience.
This other couple has rarely had a good restaurant experience. One of their favorite topics is the lousy food, service, or atmosphere at restaurants. Tim has even asked me, “Why do they go out?”
This same couple tends to get bad service in stores and other businesses too. Tim and I rarely get bad service.
The other day, this couple was telling us about some surly service they got at a nearby home improvement store. Before they could go on about it, Tim said, “Whenever I get an unhelpful clerk, I ask them if they’re having a good day.”
“And I compliment them,” I said.
Tim and I never let the seeds of lousy service turn into a full-blown problem because we speak in positive aspects to everyone we deal with.
If a woman is being rude, I find something I like about her and compliment her on it. If someone is ignoring us, we start up a conversation, asking the person questions about him or herself (people LOVE to talk about themselves).
We look for things to say that make people feel good. And when we make people feel good, they make us feel good.
Some of our friends like to go on rampages of complaints about phone service—customer service people don’t speak decent English; they don’t have the right answers; they don’t listen … blah, blah, blah.
Tim and I don’t have these problems either. Usually, by the time we get off the phone, we’re on a first name basis with the person we’re talking to and we’ve found out where the person is, how the weather is, and we usually know whether or not the person is married and has kids or pets. We talk our way into great service almost 100 percent of the time.
Many students of law of attraction have a tendency to spend time tuning their vibration to attract wonderful things into their lives—visualizing and writing out positive aspects of their current situation, but they then forget to LIVE from this perspective all the time, in all of the little dealings and errands, in all of the minor, in passing conversations.
Abraham-Hicks say, “Every time you say, ‘I appreciate that. I really like that. I applaud that. I acknowledge the value in that.’ Every time you do that, you spend some of your Energy, and it is the spending of the Energy that creates a vacuum, so to speak, or an attraction, so to speak, that draws more and more and more and more.”
Every conversation you have, whether it’s with your spouse or with the clerk at the local convenience store, is an opportunity to raise your vibration and get in the Vortex. When you speak in positive aspects, you’re using ordinary conversation to create extraordinary experiences because the law of attraction will match that positive energy. Speaking in positive aspects aligns you with the kind of experiences you want to have.
Every compliment you give out draws a compliment to you. Every bit of interest you show to someone else will come back in someone’s interest in you.
Make people feel good, and you will feel good.
Nothing you encounter in the business world is worth complaining about. Nothing.
Every negative experience can be turned by speaking in positive aspects.
(If you missed them, be sure to read the first four parts of Power Chatter: Part 1—Talk On The Dark Side; Part 2—Mundane, Not; Part 3—Talk It Up, and Part 4—Talking Tone.)
Photo by Weglet on Flickr.
A few days ago, this Abraham-Hicks quote landed in my e-mail inbox:
“When you’re vibrating purely, you get only what’s a match to that. It’s your ambivalence: ‘I like that but I don’t like that… I like that but I don’t like that..’ that keeps what you like and what you don’t like coming at you all the time. You don’t have to ‘turn the other cheek’ when you are in vibrational harmony only with what you want. Then, only what you want comes.”
This isn’t new information, obviously. I know noticing what I like brings me more of it and noticing what I don’t like brings me more of that. For some reason, though, this statement immediately projected an image of a teeter-totter into my head, and as I moved through my days afterward, I became acutely aware of how my thoughts constantly shifted from likes to don’t likes and how the teeter-totter in my head popped up and down in sync with my shifting thoughts.
The graphic visual spotlighted how much my thoughts go up and down, up and down, up and down. Just in the short five-minute drive from our house to the forest where I walk Ducky, for instance, I watched my thoughts do something like this:
It’s amazing I’m not in a state of perpetual motion sickness.
I’ve been paying attention to my emotional guidance system to help me monitor my thoughts, and I’ve been doing SO much better than I was even just a couple months ago. No more panic and anxiety. I’ve been feeling good.
But when I started paying attention, I saw how much I focus on things I don’t like. I seem to attach a dislike to every like I come up with.
I’ve even done it with Ducky, my feel good touchstone: Ducky makes me laugh, and she purely delights me, but I sure wish she wouldn’t bring in sticks and tear them into pieces to leave on my rug.
Remember being on a teeter-totter when you were a kid? You needed someone of somewhat equivalent weight on the other side so you could consistently pop up and down.
When I was in grade school, one of my classmates was an extremely fat girl. Most of the kids wouldn’t play with her, so I did. One day, she and I settled onto the teeter-totter, not thinking about how the difference in our weights was going to impact our fun. I was a skinny kid. She was huge. I straddled my end. She got on and sat down. I shot up in the air so fast I nearly fell off.
No matter how hard she tried to push off the ground to pop up in the air herself, she couldn’t do it. I was stuck up in the air until one of my friends came over and hung on to my end to lower it down.
The high end of the teeter-totter is our focus on likes. The things that please us allow us to push off and fly into the air. The things that don’t please us are the push-offs on the other end of the teeter-totter that send us back to earth. Most of us have as many dislikes as we have likes, so the balance of our thought is half up and half down.
The law of attraction matches our experience with the balance of our thoughts. If we’re half up and half down, no wonder we get so many things we don’t like in our lives. We go up, and great things happen. We go down, and lousy things happen. Our experiences teeter-totter in perfect rhythm with our thought vibration.
What we need, I’ve decided, is a nice fat focus on likes that is so big and so heavy that it catapults us into the air and leaves us there. That “up” position on the teeter-totter is Abraham-Hicks’ vortex. It’s vibrational alignment with all we desire.
I know you’ve had times in your life when something you like SO commands your attention that you don’t even notice negative things. Falling in love comes to mind. Christmas morning, a major win in sports, landing a big job, winning money—these are all such big, heavy likes that they fire us into the air and leave us there for a time.
But how can we focus on something that feels that good when nothing that good is happening in our “what is” reality?
We can either get so adept at visualizing from a place of “I already have what I want” that we feel like we’re focusing on something good that already exists OR we can focus on so many little likes that they glom onto each other and form a big heavy blob of positive energy that acts the same way a single, heavy focus does.
I’m still working on visualizing from the place of “I already have what I want.” I’m playing with a new visualizing technique that I’ll report on when I have a little more practice with it. In the meantime, though, I’m finding that just being aware of the thought teeter totter is making it possible for me to consciously look at more likes than dislikes.
Just over the last day or so, I’ve begun to see all this little likes come together to create a fat focus that is starting to weigh down the other end of my teeter-totter so I’m up in the air more often. It’s pretty fun to feel that high (excuse the pun).
Are you aware of how much your thoughts are teetering up and down? Pay attention. You may need to create your own “fat focus” to raise you up.
Last week, Tim and I made a pact to have a complaint free week. We only had a couple slips, and we caught ourselves immediately. I think that’s pretty good.
Being complaint free felt so good that we’ve extended the one week to forever. No complaining, period.
That’s the goal, anyway.
There’s a bit of a learning curve.
We’re learning that instead of complaining (as in looking at something from a negative perspective), we can look at something we don’t like and discuss it from one or two perspectives: from a what is perspective that’s judgment neutral or from a this is what I want instead perspective.
For example, Tim’s computer is old, and he has to reformat the hard drive from time to time. It’s almost time to do it again. His computer is moving slowly, and he has a lot of work to do. The other day, Tim said, “When I’m done with this project, I need to make time to reformat the hard drive again.” His tone was matter of fact. He wasn’t complaining. It was just stating what is and moving on.
I said, “Okay. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we got an influx of cash and could buy a new computer before you need to reformat the old one?”
The old, complaining me would have said, “What? Again? I sure wish we had the money to update our computers. I hate wasting time with reformatting.”
I’m learning.
A couple days after I posted that Tim and I had made our complaint free pact, my friend, Kathy, told me she happened to be reading Complaint Free Relationships by Will Bowen. (Isn’t this law of attraction evidence great? She just happened to be reading about being complaint free when Tim and I made our pact???) On Friday, Kathy loaned me the book and I read it the next evening.
This book is Bowen’s follow-up to A Complaint Free World. I haven’t read that one, but Complaint Free Relationships has great advice for becoming and remaining complaint free. Bowen’s advice is essentially what Tim and I have discovered on our own: you can still state your preferences without complaining. Just because you’re complaint free doesn’t mean you have to eat soup with a fly in it or be okay with your spouse leaving his socks all over the house (in our house, this isn’t a problem: socks on the floor are collected by our helpful pup, Ducky).
You can state what you want without the negative tone. And this is what Abraham-Hicks’ the “vortex” is all about. So it’s no wonder that having a complaint free week has put me in the vortex more than I’ve been in a very long time.
Being complaint free has other pay-offs too:
1. It improves the quality of your conversations. When you are consciously staying in a positive place, you don’t hook into other people’s complaints, and you naturally lead the conversation into more enjoyable topics.
2. It uplifts the people around you. If you announce that you’re complaint free, people make an effort not to complain (yes, even my mother has done this). And if they do complain, and you say nothing, they run out of steam and say, “Oh, that’s right. You’re not complaining.”
3. It brings more positive aspects into your awareness. When you’re not muddying up your thoughts with observations of what’s wrong, you have more room in your head for thinking of things you want and noticing things that are right about what’s around you.
Of course, being complaint free is about more than not TALKING about negative things. It’s about not THINKING about them either.
I discovered Sunday evening that I have a little work to do on that front.
Tim had made me a promise last week that he didn’t keep. I value people who keep promises, and I told him that I needed him to follow through on what he promised. I told him he had a choice: he could not make the promise in the first place or make the promise then keep it.
I thought I was being complaint free because my tone was level and I was consciously stating what I wanted. But inside, I could feel the anger building. Tim has a pattern of not following through, and he’s done some things that have betrayed my trust. As I spoke, I noticed that though my words were neutral, my thoughts weren’t. I was activating all the old frustration and rage.
Okay. Quick mental shift. I tried to find a thought about Tim keeping his promises that felt good, and I wasn’t able to do so. Too much hurt on that one to move up the emotional scale that fast.
In Complaint Free Relationships, Bowen talks about the inner pictures we have of the people we relate with. When the pictures are positive, we feel great about them. When they’re negative, we feel negative.
So I shifted my attention to what I love about Tim. I put new pictures about him in my head. Instead of the “Tim doesn’t follow through” pictures, I pulled up pictures of Tim loving me, of Tim caring for our dog, of Tim listening to me and being supportive. And I did this out loud. I started listing his great qualities.
Of course, he liked that because he was feeling bad about breaking his promise. And I immediately felt my energy shift. I could see his shift too.
When you’re going to be complaint free, it has to start in your thoughts before it moves to your mouth.
So I’m going to keep practicing complaint free living. It feels pretty darn good.
Have you made your complaint free pact yet?
Abraham-Hicks Wisdom