02.27.07
Posted in Paths to Bliss, Quick Tricks
at 3:10 pm
My house explodes when I’m feeling resistant or scared. Not literally of course, but it’s become difficult for me to deal with tidying up or the little routines I follow when I’m determined to keep the Clutter Monster at bay. I think the clutter is something I use to distract myself from what I’m resistant about. I think, “I can’t do anything while there’s so much junk on the coffee table or until the kitchen is spotless!” And then I procrastinate about cleaning so I can rationalize procrastinating about whatever I’m resistant to. Nice trick, eh?
When I’m being tenaciously resistant, I wait until I push through my resistance to the burning issue and then the mess bothers me so much that I have to do something about it. When I need to find ways to help me become less resistant, however, I start by cleaning.
Today’s Trick
Eliminate some mental and physical distraction and clutter. I live with actual clutter when I’m resistant, but different people have different coping mechanisms. If you’re feeling resistant about something, identify the ways you put off pushing through it. Do you start projects? Do you go partying? Do you blame others? Instead of engaging in your delaying behavior, spend five minutes taking some action towards facing your fears. Whether that means cleaning one room or one area of one room, thinking about something that makes you happy, or turning down plans that make you feel guilty–do something that feels like moving forward to you.
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02.23.07
Posted in Paths to Bliss
at 11:49 am
For those of us who believe that how we think impacts everything that is going on in our lives, feeling sad or low tends to be a double whammy. We know that feeling bad means that we’re off track and is creating more things that we don’t want, but we’re feeling bad and sometimes that happens and we can’t be happy all the time can we? And then we may feel even more resentful because it might feel like we’re being punished for being human when we’re doing the best we can manage. I know I’ve spent my fair share of time in that particular guilt and resentment spiral.
What I’m finding as I study and try to live a life of bliss is that our feelings are an indicator of where we’re at in the manifestation process. If we’re feeling bad we’ve outgrown the stories we tell ourselves, what we think we want is out of balance with our true desires, we’re resistant to transformational change, or we’re afraid to trust. All of those things are fairly natural as we grow and change and re-evaluate our lives and what we want. So how do we pull ourselves out of the guilt and resentment spiral?
I know how irritating it can feel to be around people who are happy when we’re feeling low. I know this because I have personally been irritated by that situation, and I have felt the irritation of others when I was the happy one. The irritation comes from the disjointed feeling of interacting with people who are operating at a different emotional level than we are. When I’m really happy, I want everyone around me to be happy and I wish they would just decide to stop feeling bad already! When I’m feeling low, I wish all the happy people would just tune it down because don’t they realize it’s not as easy as they think it is? I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
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02.21.07
Posted in Manifestation, Paths to Bliss, Visualization
at 1:51 pm
When we’re trying to work towards our happiness and what we really want, it really helps to have something to visualize–whether it’s a new job, a new house, a great vacation, a goal, or something fun. For the past month or so, there has been synchronicity in my life telling me that I needed to make a Dream Board. A Dream Board makes your dreams physically present with you which in turn builds even more energy towards them. You’re saying “I want this and I can have it!” It is also a lovely reminder of all the things that are in the works for you and a wonderful way to snap into happiness by looking at them.
What is a Dream Board Anyway?
A Dream Board is a piece of foam, cork or strong poster board where you put pictures and cut outs and messages that represent the things you want. If you want a new house, you can put a picture of your dream house on the board. If you want a new job, you can put a description and/or a picture that represents the kind of job you want or the way you want to feel about your job. By creating a Dream Board, you are opening yourself to everything you put on it because you are physically reinforcing your desires and arranging your priorities.
How Do I Make a Dream Board?
I found these instructions from Colette Baron-Reid (she has a video in the members section):
- You’ll need a large (at least 3′ x 3′) piece of foam, cork, or strong poster board; a glue stick or thumbtacks, and scissors.
- Put a border around the area where you will be putting your dream images. This tells the universe that whatever you put inside the border is what you want to create.
- Put a picture of yourself in the center.
- Put a spiritual symbol on the top that reminds you of spirituality. It can be anything–as long as it makes you think of spiritual energy.
- Put a statement of your highest good.
“This or something better now manifests for me for the highest good in divine appropriate timing.”
- Cut out photos and pictures of things you want to manifest. Accompany by affirmations.
- Hang your board somewhere you see it often.
- Turn it over to the universe. Affirm it as if it already happened and say thank you.
Some Things to Think About
The guidelines above, are just that: guidelines. You can (and should!) interpret and bring personal intuition to the process to make it meaningful to you. For example, my husband and I took a black foam board and glued some colorful paper to it while leaving a border of the black foam board instead of actually drawing a border. For nebulous goals that didn’t necessarily have a pictorial representation, I wrote out a list of feelings (when I reach this goal, I will feel like …). When the picture didn’t quite capture what I was going for, I wrote on the board to clarify.
The clarifications and intentions behind what you put on your Dream Board are a critical part of the process because you will bring what is on the board into you life at some point. This is the “be careful what you ask for” disclaimer. It’s important to make sure you want what you’re asking for and that your intentions behind the dreams you put on the board mesh with your life and what you really want.
Have fun with this process. This is a powerful way to place an order with the universe and make breakthroughs in your life. My husband and I want a new house and are having a lot of fun picking out furniture and imagining what kind of house we want. We’ve been to furniture stores and we put pictures of furniture we like and a house we like on the board. We put a picture of vacations we’d love to take. It has really been a joyful process.
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02.19.07
Posted in Manifestation, Paths to Bliss
at 12:15 pm
Odds are fairly good that if you’ve come across this site, you have heard about the Law of Attraction at least in passing. (A lot of the resources I mentioned in my previous post are related to the concept of the Law of Attraction if they don’t talk about it directly.) Basically, the Law of Attraction is that we attract everything in our lives to us through our thoughts. That means the wonderful things and situations and people and the hard or discouraging things and situations and people are in our realities because we drew them here with the things we think about. The three steps to the Law of Attraction are:
- Ask (which you cannot help doing–asking is having a desire)
- Let it go (the universe does this part, don’t worry about how)
- Allow your desires into your life (this means be happy and content and expect that they will come)
The idea that we are entirely responsible for the things in our lives is a wonderful and frustrating idea. On the one hand, if we train ourselves to expect only good–only prosperity, only good luck, only happiness, only laughter, only love–we can have all of those things all the time. On the other, most of us are not used to expecting only good, but we are used to blaming others for the negative things in our lives. When I learned about the Law of Attraction and when I talked with my friends and family about it our first reaction was a mixture of wonder and anger. We were excited about the possibility of drawing happiness and all the things we want to us, but we weren’t used to processing the bad things in our lives as a function of what we thought.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I’ve been reading books and listening to people, and a huge step in maintaining happiness as a daily practice is by finding contentment in how things are right now. By affirming statements like “I’m in debt” “I can’t find a job” “If only X happened, I could be happy” you are reinforcing the things you aren’t satisfied with and postponing your happiness.
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02.08.07
Posted in Paths to Bliss, Resources
at 11:38 am
I thought I would share some of the things I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to recently to give me inspiration and push me through resistance that pops up in my life. Since this is my first resource post, I’ll start with some of my old and new motivation staples.
Something I recommend everyone who stumbles upon this website watch is
The Secret. I had been reading a bunch of resources about manifesting and and visualization and universal energy and watching The Secret gelled everything for me and really transformed my life. The website offers a $5 streaming video of The Secret, and then if you decide to buy the DVD, they give you that money back as a discount.
A special note: Oprah Winfrey will be featuring The Secret on her show today, Thursday February 8, 2007.
What the Bleep Do We Know?
I watched this film before The Secret and it was a revelation to me. It is an interview style film with lots of scientists and professionals that introduces viewers about the idea of how thought = energy = matter.
Ask and It Is Given
I am reading this book right now and the power of it is surprising me every time I pick it up. It clues you into how the energy around us works and how to tap into it to manifest what you want.
The Game of Life and How to Play It
This book was written in the 1920’s and is another book about manifesting and the power of thought. This book is one of those books that carries power with it and just reading it will transfer positive energy to you. Whenever I need an energy pick me up, I read a couple of chapters that focus on what my issues are at that moment.
Hay House Radio
This is what motivated me to create this post. I just found it today (amazingly, since I’ve been a fan of Hay House for several years), and I’ve been a downloading fool! If you sign up for free and register, you can download mp3’s of archived broadcasts. Right now I have 12 programs sitting on my desktop and I want to listen to them all at once. There is a four part series from the authors of Ask and It Is Given in the archives.
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02.06.07
Posted in Paths to Bliss
at 9:29 am
Slow Leadership has a great post that looks at what I was getting at when I talked about reinventing what you can do from a different angle. The post talks about how our beliefs and perception can either help us or hurt us and discusses the importance of re-evaluating what we believe on a regular basis.
Useful beliefs lead to positive actions, successful outcomes and an increase in the happiness and well-being of the people involved. Poor beliefs do the opposite. For example, if you believe that most people in an organization are well-intentioned; that they do the best they can and try to help each other; and that they have the good of the business at heart, it will likely cause you to behave in positive ways. Suppose you believe all bosses, by definition, are greedy, self-centered, egotistical and corrupt; everyone is seeking to rob you of what’s due to your efforts; your colleagues are idle, dishonest and whispering about you behind your back; and the business is screwing its customers and the products are badly produced and overpriced. If you believe most of that, your life at work is going to be frustrating, miserable, stressful, and probably unsuccessful as well.
…[It’s] worth taking a look at all your beliefs and asking yourself if they’re still useful to you. Facts are facts, you should not need to argue with them. But beliefs are just opinions and should be argued about constantly. After all, if they aren’t helping you, all you need do is drop them and choose some others…
Alexander at Chief Happiness Officer expands on the idea in the context of getting abundance to work for you by monitoring your outlook:
So which is it? Is the world a nice, soft, inviting, cuddly place, ready to boost you to success in whatever venture you choose? Or is it a cold, hard, dog-eat-dog competitive place, in which only the strongest and the toughest survive?
Here’s the truth: It is whatever you think it is. Your approach determines the truth.
There’s a lot more good stuff in his post, I recommend going over there to read the whole thing.
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02.01.07
Posted in Intuition, Synchronicity
at 1:08 pm
I think one of the key ways to develop our connection with intuition is to notice “coincidences” which I like to call “synchronicity.” When words or ideas pop up in different contexts multiple times, it’s extremely difficult for me to think of them as accidents. The randomness of such events gets lower each time the word or idea pops up. The key, I’ve discovered, is noticing when themes reoccur. I thought it would be useful for me to preserve these bits of synchronicity as they come into my life to train myself to pay attention more often.
Here’s a small example: My husband and I are going on a four day vacation in March and we’ve been looking for someone to come in and check on our cats. I did a Google search and posted my dilemma on a couple of group blogs I belong to hoping that someone would have some ideas. Through my Google search I found one place that sounded reasonable and had a good feel to it. Most of the answers I got from the group sites were “put a lot of food down” (an option not possible for our high maintenance, yet adorable cats) but one answer was a glowing recommendation for the one place I had bookmarked from my Google search. Whamo! That’s the place. Thanks for the message! (See how I incorporated gratitude there? See? See?)
Here’s the theme that has been cropping up in my life over the past couple of days: The idea of committing to what we want.
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