Well I undershot my goal…by a lot. Way to highlight the importance of the last post and how current it still is for me. I did not write once a week. (More like once after 10 or so weeks?) My website got hacked and it took a while to get things back to normal, or more back to normal I should say. Part of me didn’t want to write another post because I was afraid I was just going to lose it when it inevitably happened again. I was afraid I was going to jinx it, like I was calling the hackers to my site by writing another post? Which is not the best way of thinking, never mind that it doesn’t make much sense. But that’s how I felt. Which begs the question: Why am I so sure it’s going to go wrong? Why am I not sure that it will go well?
I mean sure, for me, the answer to that can and has been, “Because it almost always has gone wrong.” That proverbial other shoe has squished the hell out of me more times than I can count. So why wouldn’t I trust my history and not think that more shoes are in my future? Because! If I keep thinking and feeling that way, I am guaranteed to be caught in a hailstorm of shoes! You know the saying, whatever you think, whatever you believe, you’re right? So if I’m spending my moments being afraid, anticipating and preparing for disaster, then yes, more often than not, disasters will come my way.
That is the premise behind manifesting, which is that, I cannot manifest something I want by focusing on what I don’t want. I will only manifest more of what I don’t want, simply because that’s where my focus is. And no, focusing on what you do want doesn’t exactly work either because many focus on the lack of it and not the actual having of it. So, how to focus on something I want and not the lack of it, when I don’t have it yet? Because, I can say that shoes staying wherever they come from and me moving through life with ease has not been my dominant experience. Yet, that is exactly what I do want.
According to the research I’ve done, there are a few ways that I can do this. Unfortunately for me, many of them require me to set aside my “reality” and act as if my preferred reality is actually the one I live in. So, I need to respond to my less than desirable reality as if the things I want have already happened. Which is incredibly hard for me! I can’t lie to myself and say things like, I’m so happy with ‘X’ when I’m clearly not.
I run into this same problem with affirmations. You’ve heard of affirmations, I’m sure. They’re very popular and Pinterest is awash with example after example of affirmations you can put out to the universe to call in what you want in your life. “You don’t love your body? Affirm that you do! Look in the mirror and say it with me, ‘I love my body!’” Yeah, that doesn’t work for me. I know the truth. I know I’m lying or at the very least not telling the whole honest truth. The whole honest truth would probably be closer to, “There are things that I do love about my body and there are things I would change.” But even that has been a long time coming. Before, the whole honest truth would have been, “I hate my body.”
And I think that’s the key. (Not hating my body, that is definitely not the key.) I didn’t move from, “I hate my body” to “I love my body.” That, for me, would have been an impossible quantum leap. So, I found the next truest thing that moved up the scale closer to “I love my body,” which was, “I think I have nice legs.” Now that was an affirmation I could say and not feel like I was lying through my teeth. I could have even started with, “I want to like my body.” Absolutely true. Sometimes, you have to go super small.
As long as I’m focusing on the things that I do enjoy and am thankful for about my reality as it is now, and on the things that I do want in my preferred reality, I will keep moving up that scale. I will think, believe, and feel better and better things, and I will be right. The undesirable things, the things that go wrong? They’re going to happen whether or not I focus on them anyway. But if I do focus on them and act in fear, then I call them more and more into my experience. So really, why would I choose to focus on them?
To be clear, I am not saying “Ignore all the bad things!” Bad things, unwanted things, do happen, all the time. They bring about emotions, initial reactions that we have no control over. It is important to acknowledge what it brings up in us, to feel the feelings, and then deliberately choose where you want your focus to be. That is where our control lies, in our response, not our initial reaction. And the more you do this, the easier it becomes. Thank God!
Questions? Comments? Let me know 🙂
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