There’s nothing like reaching over to look at your phone after a miserable night’s sleep and realizing it’s now 3AM, and you can toss and turn no further. Well that’s me right now. I just couldn’t seem to get comfortable last night and I felt too hot for some reason; so I decided to quietly exit the bed and leave my husband to the sweetness of his dreams.
Now that I am up, however, I felt there was no time like the present to compose the blog entry I’ve wanted to do since Friday. While I was at work Friday trying to keep myself mentally and emotionally in a positive place, I began to think about all the different self help authors I’ve read or listened to over the years. In particular, I’d been listening to one of Wayne Dyer’s PBS specials on YouTube earlier in the week; he’d been talking about focusing on what we want our lives to look like, (rather than what we don’t want).
Of course he is not the first person I’ve heard preach this message. I’ve read The Secret. I’ve read Joel Osteen’s, Your Best Life Now. I’ve listened to Bob Proctor’s The Power to Have It All–plus a myriad of other videos and books. I know about the Law of Attraction stuff. I’ve watched Oprah. Across the board, the message appears to be the same: focus on what you would like to see manifested in your life. Not on what you don’t want to see. But doing that just seems so hard!
So many times, I’ve found myself committing to only thinking about the positive conditions I would like to see arise in my life, only to find within about 5 minutes, I’m right back to thinking and talking about everything that’s wrong. I agree with the people who say we do this simply because we’ve allowed negative thinking to become a bad habit. We’ve gotten so used to complaining and lamenting about what’s wrong, that doing those things has become our default way of behaving; also because the negativity in our lives is often so painful, it’s difficult not to focus on it. We want it to end. We don’t want to hurt. It’s natural to embrace pleasure and push away pain.
If we are in debt, quite often we keep the debt in our reality by focusing on how awful it feels to owe people, and how sick we feel when we open bills that we have no way of paying. It can be depressing to see that you only have $7 left in your checking account until your next payday. It’s easy to start telling yourself negative stories about what will happen if you can’t pay your bills on time and making value judgments about your self worth based on your net worth–etc, etc. We’ve all been there, whether it’s about money, relationships, careers, our families, self esteem, spiritual issues–the list goes on.
It is suggested that we use our imaginations to picture the lives we want to have–and even more than that, start to feel the feelings of what it would feel like to have the things we want. If you no longer want $7 left over at the end of every month, start imagining a concrete number that you would like to have. What if you had $700 or $7000 left over every month? What would it feel like if you had $7000 left in your account every month? What would you do with that kind of money? How would it feel to comfortably have all your bills paid every month? What would you treat yourself to? What charity might you contribute to? Even if you have no idea how that would come to be, you just keep your focus on the feeling. Leave the “how” up to God.
From what I’ve researched, it seems that you have to disregard the input from your senses. So even though your eyes tell you, you live in a dump or drive a crappy car, you disregard your present situation and start imagining what it would feel like to have a nice home or drive a nice car, and then get emotionally involved and act like a person who has the house and car they want. Many of the books I’ve read, recommend writing what you desire down on paper and being very specific about it. What kind of car do you want? What year? Is it an automatic or standard transmission? What color interior and exterior would you like? As Neale Donald Walsch says in Conversations With God, most people feel that must first have something (a shiny new car), so that they can do something (get around stylishly and easily), so that they can be something (happy). But he goes on to say that the reverse is actually true–we must be something first (happy), then do the things that a happy person with a shiny new car would do (act the part), and then you will eventually have the car. Now this doesn’t mean that you go and take out a loan for a car you can’t afford. It means you have the attitude of a person who’s already been blessed with a new car until it arrives.
We can take baby steps in the right direction by beginning to be more grateful in general. I know I’m always mouthing off about what I don’t like in my life, and one day I was lying in bed and had the thought that, ‘we always tell God what we don’t like about the life He’s given us, but what if we started telling Him what we do like in our lives? For instance, I may not be thrilled when I’m scheduled to get up and go to work, but I can be thankful that I am able to get up of my own accord and brush my own teeth and bathe my own body. There is someone out there who is bed-ridden and must have someone do these things for them. And even though I’m not jumping up and down about the drive in to work, I am thankful that I have my own car to drive. I can remember the days of having to get a ride from somebody because I didn’t have a car and couldn’t have driven one even if I did. So we can do small things like being more conscious of when we begin to start the negative mental chatter and stop ourselves to see if there’s anything positive we can say.
I could go on and on about the topic. I will likely revisit it in different forms over time. I just want to say that we only get one shot at being the person we are today, and the present moment really is a gift. We shouldn’t give up on ourselves. It’s never too late to turn things around in our lives. We’re worth the effort. It doesn’t matter how messed or hopeless things look right now. We can’t see things from every angle. We cannot see things from God’s perspective. Perhaps we just need to build our faith and trust muscles by doing our parts in getting clear, focused, and excited about what we want, and believing that God knows just how and when to get us there.
I may later post some of the books I’ve found helpful over the years.
Until next time, have a wonderful Sunday!