The Secret Is Wags

Last week, I ran into Susie, a fellow regular beachcomber, on one of my walks with my dog, Ducky.

“I haven’t found an agate in weeks and weeks,” Susie said to me.  “Have you?”

“No,” I said.

“Where have all the agates gone?” she asked.

I said I didn’t know.

We chatted a bit more and went our separate ways.  Not five minutes later, having forgotten all about agates because I was thinking about traveling in a luxury coach with Tim and Ducky and her two Springer sisters, I found an agate.  And I found another five minutes after that.

Two agates … and two important things to remember about the law of attraction. (more…)

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Lately, I’ve had to turn this into a mantra:  “The feeling, the feeling, the feeling.  Focus on the feeling.”

When you’re finding reasons to feel good or looking for ways to feel like you already have what you want, either by using track changes or other visualizing methods, it’s ever so tempting to look for results.

We all love law of attraction results.  We love to hear those stories about how someone thought about something incredible and got it.  And of course, we all love to experience those results.

Almost daily, I remind myself that I manifested my husband.  I like remembering that I have the ability to deliberately flow vibrational energy toward a specific result and have the result appear in my life.

I’m discovering, however, because of a spate of unpleasant events recently, that too much focus on results can knock you off the alignment track.  (more…)

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On the way to my B.A. in Psychology about 30 years ago, I took a course in memory—how it works, how to improve it, how it impacts our personality.  The bulk of the grade for the course came from a thesis-like term paper, in which we had to put forth a theory of memory using an analogy to an ordinary object or set of objects.

I chose a big gyrating bowl of cherries.  My theory was that the system of neurological connections that handle memory was like this bowl in that each memory was a new cherry dropped into the moving bowl.  As the bowl churned the contents, the cherries agitated, and the new, whole cherries (new memories) got broken down over time.  Eventually they became bits and juice and pits.  The bits, I suggested, were those snippets of memory we have that are incomplete, that we can’t seem to connect with other things.  The juice is all of our memories, most of it not accessible by our conscious mind but there nonetheless.  The pits are long term memories, the ones that we can easily pull up.

I believe I had some theory about how to keep the cherries whole for longer periods of time, but that theory turned into juice in my own bowl of cherries. Of course, I made all this up, but it must have made some sense because the professor gave me an A+.

My own personal bowl of cherries spit out the pit of this paper several days ago when I was thinking about how to make my visualization time feel more real and therefore more enjoyable.  As I’ve written about before, visualization can do more harm than good when it isn’t done right.  And despite knowing this, I’ve felt recently that I haven’t been doing it right … still.

I know that effective visualization must have two aspects: (more…)

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If visualization (as most of us do it) doesn’t work?  What does?

Nine years ago, I created what author Sonia Choquette calls “an alchemy box.”  She used the “alchemy” term because alchemy, the medieval philosophy that asserted the possibility of changing base metals into gold, has come to stand for a magical process of transmuting anything.  So Choquette’s alchemy box is a place where you put images and representations of things that you want in order to manifest those things.

Sounds no different than visualization and manifestation boards, right?

Well, actually, it IS different.

When I made my box years ago, I wanted four main things:  to have a good amount of money in the bank (I could have been MUCH more specific), to be a size 10, to find and marry a loving man, and to be a published book author.

I put in the box some dollar bills and some play money, pictures of slender women, images of happy couples and a list of 116 qualities I wanted in the man I married, and three paperback novels on which I’d pasted my name over the top of the author’s name.

Choquette said to make your box something that pleased you, so I used a Winnie the Pooh hat box (I love all things Pooh).  I put the hat box on the floor in my bedroom, and didn’t look in it again until last year.

I pretty much forgot about it.

But within a year of creating that box, I inherited over $150,000 and my husband came into my life (my husband, who has 113 of the 116 qualities on my list).  Within a year after that, I was a size 10 (I was a size 22 at the time I made the box), and I had sold two books to major publishers and soon after went on to sell a third.

So was the box magic?

Don’t I wish.

No, the box wasn’t magic, but it has some major advantages (obviously) over visualization.  The box, you see, was a “desire heater.”

Install It And Forget It

Consider for a moment your water heater.  I bet you rarely think about your water heater, and that’s part of my point, but hang on a second and let me get there.

You or your contractor or your apartment building’s contractor or maintenance person installed your water heater.  That installation was a form of intention, an intention to heat the water in your house or apartment building.

Once the heater was installed, both the installer and you and everyone else forgot all about the water heater.  It was just there, heating the water, while you went about your business.

I think a box like the one I created nine years ago acts like a water heater.  Once you install it, so to speak, it just does its thing, holding your intention (like hot water) while you go about your business.

When I created the box, I was very excited about the idea of having the things I was representing in the box.  My HAVING vibration was activated.  Once I activated it, I didn’t keep looking in the box.  I just went about my business, doing what I needed to do on any given day.

Because I wasn’t trying to make myself think about what I wanted, I wasn’t accidentally activating the lack of it the way I did the last couple years when I tried so hard to visualize.  (And note that anytime we’re “trying hard” to do anything, we’re going against whatever it is we’re trying to do.)  Making the box activated my desire the way installing a water heater starts heating up the water.

IGNORING the box kept me in alignment with it.

I looked in the box last year when we did some remodeling and rearranging.  I’d forgotten all about what was in there, but everything that was in there DID happen in my life (some of it, the money and the size 10 body, went back out of my life, but that’s because I got out of alignment with it once I got it).

Manifesting is not really about manifesting.  It’s about being in a vibrational match with what we want.  Period.

It’s not about relentlessly focusing on what we want.  It’s about feeling good and feeling like we already have it.

The last few days, as I’ve walked in the woods with Ducky, instead of visualizing something I want like I used to, I’ve been walking through the woods feeling like the woods were mine and I was already living the life I want to live.  In other words, I haven’t been visualizing anything.  Most of my walk, I just stay present to the beauty of the woods and watching Ducky spring and race through the underbrush.  She has this jaunty little prance, and her back legs kind of swing from side to side.  I feel great when I watch her cute little butt sashay down the trail in front of me.  When I’m not thinking about the woods or Ducky, I think about the work I want to do during the day or about a movie I intend to watch or some other pretty innocuous thing that makes me feel good.

And I feel SO much better than I did when I visualized having things I don’t in physical reality have yet.

It is time, I’ve decided, to empty my old alchemy box an turn it into a desire heater.

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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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?

I love comment 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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Getting what you want requires that you feel like you have it before you get it. This is the cornerstone of vibrational matching—creating an energy vibration within that matches the external thing or experience you want.

But, say what? I have to feel good before I get the thing that’s going to make me feel good?

For many, many months, I’ve struggled with how to do this. When finances are in the toilet, your body is a candidate for the Overweight and Out-of-shape Hall of Fame, your marriage needs some serious work, and your career has disappeared into a black hole, how in the name of all that’s good are you supposed to find a way to feel good before you feel good?

“There’s too much bad stuff for me to find the good stuff,” I’ve whined too many times to count.

And so, of course, I kept getting more bad stuff.

Abraham-Hicks says, “One who is mostly an observer thrives in good times but suffers in bad times because what he is observing is already vibrating, and as he observes it, he includes it in his vibrational countenance. As he includes it, the Universe accepts that as his point of attraction and gives him more of it. So the better it gets the better it gets. Or the worse it gets the worse it gets. While one who is a visionary thrives in all times.”

Even though I have a great imagination and have visualized my heart out, I am a World Class Observer. I may visualize; but in between, when I’m knocking about in the world, I’m looking at what is.

So obviously, when I look at the mess I’ve created, I keep getting more mess.

In the last couple weeks, I’ve started getting the hang of finding that speck of feel good in the big, bad, lousy, feel yucky pot of bean chili that is life.

I’m getting the hang of it because I’ve started seeing the power of it.

It’s like cayenne pepper vs. chili powder

When you make chili, if you want it to have enough flavor, you have to dump in a lot of chili powder. A teaspoon or two won’t do. You need a ¼ cup or so, maybe more in a big pot to get nice robust flavor.

Chili is like negative focus. It takes quite a bit of negative focus to create really big messes in life. You have to REALLY linger over worry, anger, or fear to get a nice flavorful pot of Lousy Stuff.

Now cayenne pepper is another story. It only takes a pinch of cayenne to make a BIG impact on a pot of chili. Cayenne is powerful stuff.

Cayenne is the feel good thoughts in life’s chili pot. It only takes a little bit of positive focus to start turning things around. And because cayenne is so potent, you only need to find one tiny little good thing to focus on for it to start having an impact on every aspect of your life.

I’m really starting to get this (I’ve been reading about it for years, but it takes my belief system and daily activities a while to catch up). I’ve been making it too hard.

I thought I had to get in a feeling place of being rich and thin and thrilled to pieces about my husband and totally successful in order to make changes in my life. All that, of course, in the glop I was in, was too much to do.

All I really have to do is find one thing to focus on that makes me feel good. One thing. (I guess Curly had it right in City Slickers—it really is about one thing.)

That one thing acts like cayenne and starts touching everything in my life.

I’ve been using my dog, Ducky, as my one thing. Ducky totally delights me. She makes me SMILE. And I’ve built on that one thing by creating a blog about Ducky and my last dog, Muggins, and all the other joyful dogs out there. The Joyful Springer has become my cayenne. When I’m tempted to look at all the other things that are wrong, I return my attention to Ducky and The Joyful Springer (sounds like a fairy tail, er, tale, doesn’t it?)

And things are getting better. I’ve manifested some money, some reduction in our debt, some new supportive friends. I’m enjoying my husband more, and he’s forgetting less than usual. I’m eating less food without trying to because I’m just feeling so much better. And my career? I’m not concerned. It will follow along in its own time.

The other night, Tim and I watched Brigadoon. There’s a great line in that movie: “… sunshine can peek through a wee hole.”

Good thoughts and the vibrational frequency that goes with them can poke through a wee hole too. It takes just that wee hole to allow alignment to start flowing between you and your nonphysical self, the self that already stands in vibrational alignment with all you desire.

I’ve started focusing on that wee hole. And I think the hole is getting bigger.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on finding the specs of good in your life. 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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What’s the thing you do that keeps you cut off from source, that thing you do that creates resistance and throws you out of alignment with your nonphysical self?

Today’s Abraham-Hicks quote was:

“The amount of time it takes you to get from where you are to where you want to be, is only the amount of time it takes you to change the vibration within you. Instant manifestation could be yours if you could instantly change the vibration.”

In other words, if we wouldn’t do that thing we do that creates resistance in our vibration, we’d have what we want … now.

I keep doing that thing I do.

Here’s how it goes:

I decide I want something, and I clearly visualize the way I want it to be.

Law of attraction teachers spend a lot of time talking about visualization, and I think they overemphasize it. Because I’m all over visualization. I visualize all the time. And I rarely experience the things I visualize.

Why?

I think it has to do with that thing I do.

This week, I bid on a freelance writing job. I’ve been bidding on jobs for over a month now, and I’ve yet to land a job. I have 25 years of writing experience, and I’ve published three books, and hundreds of columns and short stories and articles and I can’t seem to land a freelance job. I thought it was because I was bidding too high.

So this week, a job came up that I really wanted. It was exactly the kind of writing I like to do, and I’ve done a lot of writing like it. The bidding range was $500 to $1000. Because I really wanted the job, I bid $545. I figured the only way I wouldn’t get the job was if I was underbid.

Today I found out that the job was awarded to TWO other writers, one of which bid $750 and one of which bid $625. I looked at their profiles to determine why they were chosen over me. In terms of experience, I match one of the writers and outdo the other. And I underbid them both. I would have done the same amount of work these two will do together for less than half of what the client will pay.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I was really, really disappointed.

I could feel the discord between what I want and where I am now.  I knew I was low on the Abraham-Hick’s emotional scale.

The law of attraction efficiently brought me more matching thoughts: lately, all my work has been rejected; maybe I’m not as good a writer as I thought I was; if I couldn’t get this job, how can I hope to get any others … etc., etc.

And there’s that thing I do. I’m calling it extrapolation.

I extrapolate from the one bit of bad news and smear it across the board to every other thing I’m working on.

After Ducky plays with her friend, Dixie, in the forest (which she got to do today for the first time in a week and a half), her feet are dark brown with mud. We bring her home and wash them off.

The clear water touches her feet and it’s no longer clear anymore. A little mud permeates the whole tub of water.

That is what linking one bad experience to every future experience does. I’m letting my current reaction muddy up my future endeavors.

I think this is what’s keeping me out of alignment, keeping me vibrating on a match to what I don’t want (rejection and not landing jobs and not enough money).

So I’m working on finding a better thought.

For example, today, I said to myself, “Perhaps this isn’t the best job for me. It only looked like it to me. But maybe the universe has something better in mind for me. Maybe the rejection had nothing to do with my ability or what’s coming to me next.”

Did this make me feel great?

No.

But it made me feel a little better.

And that’s all I need right now. As Abraham says, “A little better then a little better, then a little better.” You climb up the emotional scale.

Now that I’m aware of that thing I do, I’m working on doing something different. I’m working on finding a thought that disconnects the current disappointment from what is coming in the future.

How about you? Do you know about that thing you do? Are you learning to do it differently?

If you have something to share about this, please leave a comment. Sharing our wisdom on finding alignment helps us all.

Oh, and I’ve made a couple additions to the Law of Attraction Evidence page. And I’d love to get your comments about any evidence you’ve experienced.

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Today, I was reminded of a University of Chicago study on visualization.

In the study, basketball players were tested to determine their free-throw proficiency. Once tested, the players were randomly placed in one of three groups.

The first group practiced shooting free throws for an hour each day.

The second group visualized shooting free throws daily.

The third group didn’t play basketball or think about basketball.

After 30 days, all the players in all three groups took another free throw skill test.

The players in the group that had practiced daily improved by 24 percent.

The players in the group that hadn’t done anything didn’t test as well as they had the first time (no big surprise).

The players in the third group, those who had ONLY visualized, improved by 23 percent, nearly as much as those who had physically practiced!

This is the power of the mind.

If you’re old enough, you may remember the old Aqua Velvet commercials where the men get slapped in the face with the aftershave.  I think they said something like, “Thanks, I needed that.”

Being reminded of this experiment was my slap in the face. It warned me that I’ve been doing the negative equivalent of visualizing my financial doom.  That’s what worry is—visualizing what you don’t want.

Well, enough of that. Since I’ve been going around shouting, “Yahoo, we won the lottery!” I’m finding it easier to imagine actually winning and moving to Oregon like we want.

The more I imagine it, the better I feel. And as I’ve said, it’s the feeling that matters more than the seeing!

How about it? What are you visualizing in a way that’s making you feel good?

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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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Last weekend, Tim and I watched the movie, Shallow Hal.  It so inspired me to change how I was seeing the world that I decided to start a Feel Good Helpers page to talk about the movies and other media that can help us feel good.

I won’t repeat the plot of the movie here, but the gist of it is that Hal saw a beautiful girl where other people saw a fat girl.  When he fell in love because of what he saw, his life was transformed into what he wanted it to be.

I realized that seeing abundance is exactly the same as seeing beauty.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s really there or not.  If you see it, you feel different.  And if you feel different, you’ll vibrate different.  And if you vibrate different, by the law of attraction, you’ll attract different things into your life … abundant things.

I’ve decided to see MONEY:  all the ways my life reflects financial abundance instead of looking at the ways that it doesn’t.

Sure I have debt.  Sure I get creditor phone calls.  Sure I have dwindling resources.  Yadda, yadda, yadda.  NI!

But I have a wonderful home.  I have beautiful things to look at.  I have a wonderful Springer Spaniel.  I have two cars.  I have appliances that do the things I need them to do.  I have clothing.  I can buy groceries.  I can pay my bills right now.

What will happen if I keep my attention on this evidence of financial abundance instead of the “reality” of lack?

I don’t know.  But I’m going to find out.

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