Finding a Retreat Centre

I specifically wanted a retreat rather than just a day-course because I wanted to be able to immerse myself in the experience, and take some time out from daily living and that included my laptop! I was looking not only for the meditation tuition but also the chance to just get quiet and be by myself with my thoughts for a little while. I didn’t really know where to start so I just Googled around ‘meditation retreat’ and that started to bring up results fairly local to me.

Many of the retreats I found initially seemed a little more ‘hardcore’ than I was looking for - silent retreats providing only dormitory accommodation. I wanted to have my own room so I could be alone but I also didn’t want a silent retreat either. You may recall that I did an experiment in silence a couple of weeks ago - my results were pretty pathetic and I was quite amazed at just how much I chatter away to myself even when I’m alone :-) My experiment was cut short after only a few days due to a tummy bug but it was long enough to discover that silence does not come easily for me!

I finally found a weekend-long retreat a couple of hours away from me in the coastal resort of Brighton in the UK. It was run by the Bodhisattva Centre which is a Buddhist centre and part of the New Kadampa Tradition of Buddhism. Although I knew next to nothing about Buddhism I knew that their basic philosophy was one of kindness and compassion so that appealed to me. I have since discovered that this Kadampa tradition is an effort to bring Buddhism to the west and the centres are open and accessible to westerners hence the relaxed rules about silence and so on!

Initial Impressions

When I first walked in through the door I was immediately greeted by a mouthful of cherry and chocolate chip icecream - seriously! This isn’t a standard way of welcoming newcomers, there just happened to be a woman there eating icecream and she simply offered me some! I was quite overwhelmed by that simple act - I was a complete stranger off the street and yet she offered me a huge mouthful of her rather small pot of icecream. I later found out that this woman is recovering from breast cancer.

I had expected everybody there to be ordained monks but they weren’t. The icecream lady, Leslie lives at the centre but is not a nun. Similarly, the man who conducted the actual meditation sessions was also what they call a ‘lay Buddhist’ - somebody who considers themselves Buddhist but who is not ordained and therefore is free to live an ordinary life. This really helped me feel at home. I was also mildy amused to see the monks and nuns with mobile phones! I didn’t think monks were allowed things like that :-)

The atmosphere at the centre was immediately welcoming. I was shown to my room, which was basic but comfortable. I dropped off my coat and my bag and made my way down to the lounge. I am quite a shy person in new surroundings with unfamiliar people and I started to feel nervous but this didn’t last. Leslie was in the lounge and started chatting to me straight away and made me feel at ease. A few other visitors arriving for the weekend retreat turned up over the next hour or so and before long I was in deep conversation with a whole bunch of strangers which was quite odd for me!

The Welcome Talk

The retreat officially starts on the Friday night with an introductory talk but the main meditation sessions are held four times on the Saturday and then twice on Sunday morning. The introductory talk made me feel at ease straight away. The fact that it was not a monk who was conducting it helped and he talked about the everyday little annoyances that cause us frustration. He was actually very funny and had us all in stitches many times which I wasn’t expecting.

The whole atmosphere of the centre was welcoming and cheerful - I had expected a somewhat sombre experience but it wasn’t like that at all so I think I found the right retreat for me.

The Meditation Sessions

There were six sessions in all, lasting around 60-90 minutes and each one started with a talk about a certain topic such as happiness, anger and so on and then we did a guided meditation. These only lasted around 15 minutes which was just right for beginners I think. I found that as before, when we started my mind immediately began to race despite the calm atmosphere but this subsided and by the end of the 15 minutes I was feeling a deep relaxation and my mind had quieted down immensely.

I had a strange problem in a couple of the sessions though - I kept falling asleep! In one of them I nodded off 8 times, I just couldn’t stop myself. I spoke to somebody else about it and they suggested that it might have been a posture problem - leaning too far forward instead of keeping upright and sure enough I was able to stay awake for the next session thankfully. I don’t think anybody noticed me nod off, my head would tilt forward and then I would wake and make a little jump but everybody else had their eyes closed :-) Took me back to my uni days of falling asleep in lectures hehe.

Final Thoughts

Although this retreat was held at a Buddhist centre, at no time was buddhism pushed on us. The talks did introduce some of the concepts such as the destructive power of anger, the benefits of virtues such as patience and compassion, karma etc but these were discussed in relation to the goal we all share - to find happiness. If you are looking to start meditation and need some help I can highly recommend the NKT and they have centres all over the world.

It is my understanding that they are a non-profit organisation so the retreats are very cheap. I paid £95 which is less than $200 for the whole weekend including the medidation sessions, and full board accommodation - all meals were included. Normally you’d be hard pressed to find just a Bed & Breakfast room at these prices never mind food and tuition as well!

I loved the weekend, and not just for the meditation but also for the friends I made. I met around 15 people on the weekend and very much enjoyed their company. Many of them I will never meet again as this centre was not local to me but I did find out that there is one about an hour from me that holds evening meditation sessions so I’m going to try those out. I plan to go back on a regular basis to renew my knowledge of meditation and just for the sheer enjoyment of the weekend.

Returning to Normality

I came back from the retreat on Sunday evening and when I switched my computer on I had almost 100 emails waiting for me! I had made the decision that after this weekend I would meditate every day and so far I have kept to that but I have found it more difficult to do at home. The inputs that we have in our day - the work we do, the TV we watch, the conversations we have, all of these sink into our minds and cause incessant noise which makes it very difficult to meditate but it does get easier.

On Monday I found myself fidgeting, I couldn’t get comfortable and I was starting to think that I was never going to be able to get it right but after a few minutes the noise began to quieten and when I opened my eyes I realised I’d been meditating for 15 minutes. My experience yesterday was similar so this is now a new daily habit for me. In future posts I might talk more about the meditation itself when I am a little more familiar and experienced with it.

Life is a Complex Web of Needs

We all have some very basic human needs - health, food, shelter, clothing, human contact and so on. If one of those needs isn’t being met then we aren’t even surviving, let alone thriving. But once those basic needs are met there are other needs over the top and these will vary from person to person. Most people value money/materialism in some way - a career, a home, a car and so on. Most people have needs for intimate relationships, family & friends. Some people need to be very physical, perhaps in some kind of sport. Others have a strong need for religion or spirituality etc.

Whatever our needs are, when something happens to damage one of them such as loss of a relationship or job, or even worse - a loss that affects several of them at once, it causes us to suffer greatly and it feels like our whole world is collapsing. Unfortunately in times of crisis like this we find it difficult to see what is still working in our lives because all we can see at this time is our problem area which feels all-consuming.

Here are 4 ideas that may help keep you going through these hard times:

1) Never Lose Hope

The past is over, the future does not exist, all there really is, is now. But when your now feels bad, how do you get through the day? Hope.

Hope is the one thing that you should keep at the front of your mind whenever you feel really low. You just never know what is around the corner. There are hundreds of stories of people who seemed to be facing circumstances that offered no hope and yet some kind of salvation or solution arose that could never have been predicted.

We have to have hope that things will not always be as they are, that life will get better, and that we’ll find a way through the crisis and find the happiness at the end of it. Without hope, we are lost! Never lose hope, you just never know what today will bring.

2) Work on the Unaffected Areas of Your Life

When a crisis first descends upon us, it feels as though nothing else matters, but if we can stop for just a moment and think about it, we know that’s not true. For example, the feeling that nothing else matters often arises after the loss of a loved one. People going through this stop caring about their jobs, their health and so on but deep down they know that if their loved ones were still with them, those things would be important.

What is important to us is a very individual thing - everybody is different and it usually changes over time as we age. It can be a useful exercise to have a look at your own life and pick out the elements that are important to you, and rate each of them on a scale of say 1-10 where 0 is the absolute worst possible scenario and 10 is ‘living the dream’. The chances are that even if there’s an area which is at a zero which is causing you massive pain right now, there are other areas that are much better. Now forget about the areas that you’re having the real problems with and look at the areas that are okay, can they be even better?

For example, let’s say you’ve lost your life partner and rate your relationship a 0 and that is causing you pain - how is your health and your career? Whilst they may be suffering a little due to your overall state of mind, they aren’t necessarily related to your relationship status. You could try to forget about your lack of relationship and work on your career for a while. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. You’ve lost your job but you’re married - can you make your marriage even better? Can you make more friends? Can you work on your health? Those other areas do matter, and when we see life as a whole interconnecting sum of parts, even if we lose a part - a lot of it is still there.

3) Fill Your Days With Good Feeling Moments

What is the real purpose of life? Whilst entire books have been written on that subject, I hope one thing that all readers of this blog will agree on is that life should feel GOOD! :-) No matter what we are doing in life, it needs to be enjoyable for us. We often face times of particular difficulty or hardship perhaps upon the arrival of a new baby or the start of a new business or any number of other circumstances. But even during the most trying times I believe that it is imperative that we try to do something that makes us feel good each and every day without exception. When going through a crisis, at the beginning it might be the only thing that gets us through the day.

What feels good to you? There are big things and little things and lots of things in between. Big things might include a nice holiday or something adventurous and little things may include soaking in a luxurious bath, eating chocolate cake, spending time with a friend or watching a favourite movie but find your feel good stuff. Make a list of all the things that feel good to you and make the effort to incorporate them daily. Then even if everything else seems like it is heading south at least we know there is a little bit of joy to be had every day which gives us another reason to keep going through our crisis.

4) Find the Lesson

There’s a saying that everything that happens to us in life happens for a reason and our hard times come to us in order to teach us something. Once we learn the lesson, we don’t have to keep repeating the experience. So, as the theory goes, as long as we keep fighting against the situation and can gain no benefit from it, we’re doomed to continue to endure it but once we can find the hidden lesson within the experience, we should find a way out of it.

I’m sure we’ve all had experiences in our past that were highly traumatic at the time but with the benefit of hindsight we could see something positive that arose out of the trauma. The difficult thing to do is to try and find the benefit or the lesson whilst we are in the midst of the crisis itself. If there is something, anything, that can be positive about the experience we can hang on to that and it helps us find a little bit of meaning to get through the days.

5) Meditate to Find Inner Peace

Perhaps this should actually be top of the list and not the bottom because if we were able to find true inner peace, then we would not even suffer in the first place. Perhaps the best known for this are Buddhists who are able to remain peaceful and calm amidst all circumstances. They want for nothing and they do not suffer.

Most of our pain comes from some kind of loss, or the inability to gain something which is really the same thing as loss - they both boil down to an attachment to something outside of ourselves. It doesn’t matter whether that attachment is to something material such as a home, or a person, or something intangible such as a reputation or political position. It is the loss of something to which we are attached or the inability to gain something to which we are attached which causes us pain. If we could truly let go of our attachments then we would not suffer.

However I put this at the bottom of the list as this is an extremely difficult thing for most Westeners to do, including myself. For me, I have made a commitment to finding this inner peace but for all I know, it might take a lifetime so while I’m waiting for that, I’ll work on the other four!

Over the last few months I have found an increasing number of references to the practice of meditation; it seems everything I see or read is telling me to meditate. I have tried it a few times but so far my results have not been pleasing. Most of the advice seems to be to try to quieten your mind and this is where I have a problem - my mind never shuts up, or if it does, it is only for very brief moments.

I concluded that I needed help with this meditation thing so I have booked myself onto a weekend course at a Buddhist centre for the end of the month which I am really looking forward to. But that’s not the purpose of the post…

This morning I read the book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra. It was a totally engaging read and I read it in one sitting though I can see that I will need to read it again and again. It resonated with me with every chapter on every level and there was a specific idea in the first chapter that really hit me. As well as the practice of meditation, Chopra also encourages the practice of silence.

What is silence? Mainly not speaking out loud but also silencing the other external noises such as the TV. It occurred to me that it is no wonder that I find it hard to quiet my mind when I can’t even quiet my body! I am not a particularly loud person - I work alone, I don’t watch much television and yet I often find that I need conversation of some form. I use a tabbed web browser and keep my email tab open at all times. I am often praised for my quick replies :-) I use Twitter and tweet on a fairly regular basis throughout the day. I even (I can’t believe I’m admitting this in public!) talk out loud to myself! Yes there I am in my office all alone, chatting away to myself!

So, whilst I wait for my meditation weekend I am going to practice some silence daily. These will be the rules:

• No Internet - I’ll shut down my browser
• No TV, radio or any kind of music
• No chatting!… to myself or anyone else :-)

I will however continue to work so it is not the same as complete stillness but it is a start. I’ll begin with perhaps 15 minutes today and then increase by 5 minutes a day and I will simply see where it takes me. I am going to leave myself completely open to the results and not expect anything, not plan any time scale other than the starting time period.

What if I get interrupted? I do not live alone and I am frequently interrupted by people bursting into my office to speak to me. I could ask not to be disturbed but this is something I want to keep private (err, with the exception of blogging about it!) I don’t expect my family to understand and wouldn’t particularly want them to. If I get disturbed I shall simply start over. If this happens a lot it will be an excellent exercise in patience :-)

As a side note, you may have noticed an unusual gap between this post and the last. Something simply - stopped. I had nothing to say. I started this blog because I felt as if I had so much to talk about, so many questions to ask and then somewhere along the way I tried to become a ‘proper’ blogger and set out schedules for myself. That’s fine for a commercial-style blog where you’re trying to build an audience or an income but that has never been my goal with this one so I simply let go, stopped writing and decided to simply do nothing and see what happened. Today I had something to say, so I wrote this post. I have no idea when the next one will be :-)

I’ve been studying this Law of Attraction stuff for over a year now and whilst I have managed to attract some of things that I want there are some things that elude me. Can your beliefs block you from attracting what you want? Yes they certainly can.

How Do You Manifest?

According to Esther Hicks, there are two primary factors that come into play with the manifestation of anything and they often conflict each other:

• The strength of your desire
• Your belief that you will manifest your desire

Most of us do not have a problem with the desiring part. Let’s take an example of money - many people want more money in their lives and for some people that desire is extremely strong but the problem is that they simply do not believe that they will be able to manifest what they want.

Beliefs About Luck

In the UK we have a game show called “Deal or No Deal” where players can win money. They have a box with an unknown sum of money that can vary from just one penny to £250,000 and they don’t know how much their box contains. As they play the game the banker will offer to buy their box for a sum of money. Last week a woman was playing and she said that all week long she had seen herself winning £75,000 and so she wrote herself a cheque for that sum and looked at it every night in the hotel. When it was her turn to play, guess how much she won? £75,000.

When I saw that I said, “oh my gosh, that is Law of Attraction in action!” but could I reproduce that? Not a hope in hell! I don’t believe in games of chance, I don’t play the lottery and so no matter how much I wanted something like that there is simply no way that I could make myself believe that I would win and so it is for most people when it comes to luck. Not many people believe that they have the power to make the lottery balls fall on their numbers for example.

Beliefs That Out Cancel Desires

People block themselves in this way in more regular circumstances all the time. Have you ever gone for a job interview and thought to yourself, “well I’m not going to get it”, before you’ve even had the interview? If your belief that you wont get the job is stronger than your desire then you’re not going to get that job! Whether this is Law of Attraction or just low self esteem at play - the results seem to be the same. Those people who are down on themselves all the time and have learned to believe that they are unworthy will tend to manifest that very belief.

Thankfully, our beliefs can also help us avoiding some of the ‘bad’ stuff in life. Most of us have strong desires about things that we don’t want and get what we focus on whether it is wanted or not so this can go against us. However the belief part of the equation works here as well. For example, most of us would not want to break a leg whilst watching television for example! But of course, as adults it would actually be extremely difficult to do that accidentally so most of us have a very strong belief that we would NOT break a leg whilst watching television. Our desire not to break a leg is very strong but our belief that it would never happen whilst watching television is so strong that it cancels out the desire so we never attract it, and in this case, that’s a good thing!

Skiing however, is another story… I went snowboarding last week and I asked a friend of mine if she’s like to come with me. She said, “oh no, I’d probably fall over and break something!” I tried to assure her that the beginners class is pretty safe but then I stopped myself realising that if she had a strong belief that she would break something then she probably would!

Beliefs & Health

What about something like cancer? Beliefs around that subject vary greatly. If several members of your family all died of cancer then you might believe that you will get it also. On the other hand if you have read Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life, you might believe that cancer is caused by deep emotional resentment and thus believe that having got all that out of your system that it would be impossible for you to get cancer.

Since reading Louise’s book, I don’t suffer from colds & flu. Even if I manage to catch one from a friend, it will bounce off me within 24 hours. I haven’t had a significant cold in over a year and there is no other reason than that I no longer attract them. My health is no better than it was a year ago. I simply believe that colds are attracted and that belief has grown so strong that they just don’t affect me. Last week I went to stay with a friend who had been suffering with a cold for over a week and she had caught it from her baby. She warned me of the cold before visiting and I said “oh don’t worry, I don’t catch colds” and she thought I was odd but did I catch her cold? Nope :-)

Beliefs About How Things Work

When we want to manifest something, it is said that it is best to concentrate only on what it is that we want and not to concern ourselves with how or when it might happen but I think a lot of us have difficulty with this. For example, returning to the subject of money again, many of us want more money but if we cannot think of way in which it could come to us, we don’t believe that it will. A person who is in a low paying job who feels as though they do not have the skills to get a higher paying one and cannot think how money could come any other way will not believe that he can come into more money.

I feel fairly fortunate here as being self employed I believe that there is no limit to my potential earnings - but I am still not earning a living yet. Why not? Well, I’ve been looking at my thought patterns recently and looking at where I might be going wrong and I found several beliefs lurking beneath the surface that have blocked me. For example, I don’t just want money - I want a regular income and from my current position in my business I could not see how to generate one quickly. I have blocked myself just like somebody in regular paid employment.

I have since had a revenue idea but I know that my beliefs are probably holding it at arms length because all I have all these thoughts about how it should work, and how much there is to do to put the idea into place. If I could just let go of my beliefs about how it is supposed to work and just focus on the end result that I want then I might be able to get myself out of the way and manifest it a little quicker!

Any Others?

I’m sure there are many other ways in which we block ourselves from attracting what we want. Have you had any similar experiences?

This post is part of a series of insights about the Law of Attraction.

Many people believe that the Law of Attraction determines every detail of our reality, both in our physical existence here on Earth and our non-physical reality, whatever that may be and that we can literally attract anything that we desire, even if that conflicts with other accepted laws of the Universe. Let’s investigate that idea…

What Other Laws Are There?

In our physical world there are many laws that are scienficially based such as the law of gravity, the laws around life and death (everything that lives must also die), water seeking its own level, hundreds of mathematical laws and so on. Can your power of attraction defy these laws?

Can We Defy These Laws?

I was listening to quite an old Abraham Hicks recording recently and somebody asked about the ageing process and human mortality. Abraham said that anyone could live for 500 years (or any number) if they had a desire for it and an equal belief that it would happen. Remembering that the Law of Attraction has two component parts - the strength of your desire, and the belief that you can have what you desire, many of us have strong desires but fall short on the belief part.

Abraham suggested in this recording that no human being had ever lived for 500 years because nobody had yet managed to develop a belief that it would happen that was strong enough. However I challenge that idea. Let’s take another law - the law of gravity. If you stand at the top of the building and jump off then you’re going to hit the ground - unless you believe you can fly! This is something else I have heard discussed. If we can have everything we want then why can’t we fly? By fly, I mean naturally like birds and not artificially in an aeroplane.

I have always wanted to fly (don’t laugh!) and I often have extremely vivid dreams where I am flying just like something out of Heroes! So Abraham claims that no human being has ever developed a strong enough belief that he could fly so as to be able to manifest it but that simply is not true. There may not be anybody of sound mind who has that belief but what of those who are under the influence of some kind of drug or are mentally disturbed in some way? There are many cases of people who have died whilst drunk or on drugs because they thought they could fly or swim underwater or something to that effect. In that moment they truly believed they had that ability but obviously they did not and their paid the price with their lives.

Can the Law of Attraction Bend the Rules a Little?

Okay so I would like to see somebody challenge this and learn to fly using their power of attraction. I doubt its going to happen in the lifetime of this blog so if we can’t defy the laws of the Universe are there circumstances in which we can bend them a little? Take a few examples:

• A 95lb woman who lifts up a car to free her son trapped underneath it
• Somebody who cures themselves of cancer in 3 months without western medicine
• The woman who lived to 122 years old!

There are so many stories of people who beat the odds, the do the ‘impossible’, who find superhuman powers within themselves and so on. We like these stories, we make TV shows about them, they inspire us to better ourselves but how does the Law of Attraction fit into this? Did the woman who lifted the car to free her son believe she could lift it? I doubt she even thought about it - belief or non belief probably was not even a factor. She most likely simply did what felt right at the time.

With health in particular there are now more and more cases of patients defying their doctors. We could argue that this is all down to belief. After all, Eastern medicines and philosophies have been around for thousands of years and many of those people who defy doctors and doing so because they are abandoning western beliefs and adopting Eastern ones - they are not necessarily defying the laws of the Universe. The laws state we will all die at some point but they are no laws about how quickly our bodies can heal, or how much strength we have, or how long we live so all of these things are flexible.

Does This Even Matter?

I see a lot of people using topics such as this one to dismiss the Law of Attraction. They say that if you can’t learn to fly using LoA then it obviously doesn’t work. Nobody will ever really know. This is not something that can be scientifically proven but does it matter anyway? Does it matter whether or not we can fly or we can live forever? If we can use something like LoA to enhance our lives whilst we are here and within the constraints that our world provides for us we can still live pretty darn good lives!

That is the way that I see it - just one law that operates within the context of all of the others in this Universe. Can it attract prosperity, health, loving relationships, fun & adventure? I hope so! Can it attract an ability to fly? Only in my dreams :-)

In a recent post I explained how other people’s opinion of you has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with them and how they are feeling, what they believe, their values and so on. In this post I want to turn that around and look at how your opinions affect your world.

Opions Are Formed on Everything

Opinions about people are just one way in which we view the world. We also hold opions about everything in life - our jobs, events in our lives, our neighbour’s cat, worldwide events and absolutely everything else. The point I was trying to get across in my previous post about opinions is that those opinions or viewpoints are formed internally and this applies to everything else in life too. As a result, how you see the world - your world, the world of your friends and family and the world at large, has very little to do with the actual physical circumstances of the world and everything to do with YOU and how you feel, what you believe, what you choose to think and so on.

Let me give you a practical example… Last month I had the great pleasure of seeing Madonna in concert at Wembley Arena in the UK. I have wanted to see her live since the early nineties when I saw a video of her latest tour. For me the concert was an absolute blast - it was everything I expected it to be and more. I had goosebumps all night long, I loved it and it was absolutely the highlight of my month.

However, not everybody felt the same way. There were sound problems and some people were so disgusted by it that they got up and left half way through. Apparently the next day there were complaints all over the Internet. While I was queuing up for the toilets after the concert there was a woman behind me on the phone to a friend about the experience. She complained about some of the songs and the way the set was arranged, the accompanying videos and so on. The very things that I thought were great were a turn off to this woman.

Did Madonna put on a brilliant show or did she let down her fans? Neither. The fact is that Madonna performed a concert and yet it is not logical or even possible to attach any labels to it such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because that is something that can only be placed by the individual and that label will be different for everybody even though the physical experience was the same. To me, she put on a brilliant show and to other people, it sucked. All of those viewpoints are accurate to those individual people and has very little to do with Madonna!

The Story of Two Villages

I don’t remember where I read about this story but I’ll paraphrase it here. There are two villages separated by a river and there is a man who conducts crossings from one village to the next. Very often when he takes somebody across the river they will ask him, “what are the people like in the other village?” and he responds by asking them, “well, what are the people like in your village?”. If they respond that in their village people are generally friendly and helpful he will tell them that in the other village they are much the same. If they tell him that the people in his village are unfriendly and just out for themselves the river man will tell his passenger that the people in the other village are much the same.

You see the river man understands the way the world works - he knows that his passenger is going to see in the other village pretty much the same thing he saw in his current village because what he sees and his opinion of the people in the other village come from within himself, and have nothing to do with the village or the people in it.

You Can’t Make Somebody Else See What You See

I have a friend who is a police officer working in London and she has seen a lot of bad stuff in her time and has also suffered several personal injuries through her work. I remember a couple of years ago having a long debate with her about people and the world in general. She believes that people are inherenly bad, and that the world is a bad place. I believe that people are inherently good and that the world is a good place.

Back then, I didn’t know the things that I am talking about today and I remember fiercely defending my viewpoint and our debate became quite heated! She still holds the same opinion now, and so do I but what has now changed is that I understand that the world is simply what it is, and that it is not good or bad as those labels exist only in our own judgements. I see the world as a good place because that is how I choose to see it but I understand why other people would see it as a bad place and now I can simply accept that we each see it differently, and that those experiences are different for everybody and there is no need to try and make another person see the world (or anything) as you do. You wouldn’t be able to - it’s impossible because you are not them.

The World is How You Choose it to be

You will experience the world - people, jobs, events, experiences however you choose to. Of course, when you have lived your entire life a certain way and hold certain beliefs that have been a lifetime in the making then it is unlikely that you will have any radical shift overnight. What I am hoping to do in this post is open your eyes to the possibility that something you are perceiving in a negative way might not necessarily have to be as bad as you think it is. Does everybody else feel the same way or do others see things differently? Are other people enjoying something you loathe? Is it possible for you to feel better about something by changing the way you think about it?

How do you see the world?

Many of us go through life worrying about what other people’s opinion of us is. We want to be liked, to be loved, admired, popular, looked up to or all manner of similar emotions. The trouble is, what somebody else thinks of you actually has nothing to do with you at all!

An Example

As some of you know, my other blog is about Internet Marketing. Now in the IM world there is a man called John Chow who is somewhat ‘famous’ in this niche because his IM blog now rakes in over $30,000 a month and every month he publishes a post stating his earnings just like I do on my IM blog. Now John Chow is a guy who has attracted a large amount of attention due to his financial success and a lot of it is highly negative.

Now what I find interesting is this… setting aside those people who have met John Chow in the flesh, the rest of us know him only from his blog and online presence which means that anyone who reads his blog is exposed to exactly the same information about him, and yet opinions about him differ hugely. One of my recent posts managed to get into a discussion about him, and one of my commenters, Billy Loi had this to say about John:

John Chow for example is incredibly arrogant. Although I do have a lot of respect for him as a highly successful Wordpress blogger who have carved out a niche for himself, he just turns me off by his arrogance. I don’t mind people being arrogant if they show some respect for the little guy like me who is started out as a blogger.
His blogs are so negative about the little guy starting out as a blogger. I get incredibly depressed when I read his blogs.

He looks down on the little guy who is started out. Like for example, do not contact me until you have 100 thousand visitors a day on your blog!!
So even though John Chow has a lot of subscribers, they are all in the same league as him. Just imagine, if John were to invite people to a blogging convention, I would feel uncomfortable going there because I would feel like I don’t fit in.

I know that Billy is not alone in this sentiment and yet I don’t feel that way at all. I have never considered John to be somebody who brags or is arrogant in any way - he simply states his income and I do the same. If my income were to grow to the point where I earned that much and I continued to post my income statement every month, would that be seen as bragging by some people? My suspicion is yes. Why is that?

Because the opinion that you hold of somebody else, has very little to do with them and everything to do with yourself. Billy feels that John is arrogant but I have never got that sense from him. What I see is a family man who uses his financial success to make sure that he has a great time in life and gets to spend quality time with his family. Those are traits that I desire for myself and so when I read John’s blog I admire him and think, yeah I want that too.

My opinion of John has nothing to do with John, and everything to do with me! Because his lifestyle resonates with me, I see the good stuff, I pick out what I like and as a result my opinion of him is completely different to somebody else who feels that the lifestyle projected in the blog is a turn off. However John is who he is and he does what he does and nobody else’s opinion makes any difference to that - it doesn’t change anything.

Remember that neither myself or Billy have ever met John so the only way we have formed our own opinions of him is through his blog. We have both been exposed to exactly the same material and yet have gone on to form completely different opinions which are rooted in our own values, beliefs and ideals, and have very little to do with what we were actually reading!

Other People’s Opinions Of You Don’t Matter

Can you imagine the turmoil that John would be in if he listened to everybody else’s opinion of him? Being such a prominent figure in his niche means that he gets hundreds of comments to his blog and tons of emails too. Imagine if he read the comment that Billy left on my blog about him and thought to himself, “Hmm, I’m coming across as arrogant, I’ll have to try and change that in future posts”. Billy’s opinion of him may change as a result but then what would I think of him? Who knows but my opinion would probably change too.

What this boils down to is that old saying, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. It might be a cliche but it is so true! When you realise that what other people think of you comes from what they are feeling about themselves, what their own values and beliefs are, and let’s not forget - what kind of mood they are in at the time at which they encountered you, then you can see that trying to please others and get their approval is a completely futile waste of time and energy.

Have you ever had an experience where you have blown something ‘out of proportion’ or you overreacted to something and then when you looked at it again when you felt differently, the very same thing that you looked at before now seems different? Has the situation changed? No, YOU have! And this is how opinions are formed! Somebody could be having a really bad day and then encounter somebody who rubs them the wrong way and then forms a very low opinion of that person but the next day they feel better and the person whom they had the low opinion of now doesn’t seem so bad even though nothing has changed!

What other people think of you has everything to do with them, and what they are feeling and thinking and going through. They will see what they want to see and nothing you do, or say will make any difference. I have my own share of online ‘enemies’ too. Every now and then somebody will stop by my blog (the IM one) and tell me that I suck or something but it really is irrelevant because what they think of me really has nothing to do with me at all, and is just about what they are going through at the time.

So, stop worrying about what other people think of you - whatever it is, it’s their opinion and they are entitled to it, and nothing you do is going to change it anyway.

This post is part of a series of insights about the Law of Attraction.

My first introduction to the Law of Attraction was via the movie, The Secret and after watching that I felt very uplifted and it seemed as though this mysterious law was the answer to absolutely all of life’s problems. All you had to do was think about exactly what you wanted in all areas of life and you’d never need to feel pain ever again…

Those people who seem to have mastered the Law of Attraction certainly do appear to lead wonderful lives in many areas but when I looked at things more deeply I realised that this idea that the Law of Attraction could prevent you from feeling any pain was a myth. Much of the emotional pain that we endure in life comes from some kind of loss - loss of a loved one, loss of a relationship, a job, some social standing and so on. The first one - loss of a loved one, in terms of death is something that the Law of Attraction can do absolutely nothing to prevent.

My mother is almost 80 years old and it suddenly occurred to me one day that if I succeed in attracting the kind of life that I envision for myself, that I will live for a great many years after my mother dies which also implies that she will die whilst I am alive, and thus - I feel the pain of loss. Every transient being will die one day and when we love that being, it hurts when they die.

There are many spiritual teachers who say that there is no real death and that we simply transition into our non-physical form and that the essence that makes us what we really are never actually dies. Whether that is true or not does not change the fact that when somebody close to us dies (or leaves us in some other way) that it leaves a hole, it changes our life. In short, we lose something and we feel pain due to this loss.

The Law of Attraction cannot do anything about this kind of loss. Even by focusing on what we want doesn’t really help because when we are in the midst of that loss, all we want is that person (or animal or whatever) back in our lives. Over the longer term we might be able to concentrate on the qualities of that relationship that brought us joy, focus on that and then go on to find it again in new relationships but most people would find themselves unable to do that for some time after the loss first occurred. For example, if you lose your life partner you are unlikely to go looking for a new one the very next day and so it is natural to go through a period of emotional pain whilst you adjust to the change.

So, this was the first of my Law of Attraction insights - even if we manage to attract everything that we want into our lives, it is quite possible and even likely that we will go on to lose some of those things we attracted and that whilst we are attached to those things, people, jobs etc we will feel pain if we lose them. This really is just a realisation of the knowledge that everything changes all of the time. Learning to deal with the fear of change can be a starting point for being able to handle the challenges that life throws at us in this way.

This post is part of a series of insights about the Law of Attraction.

I’ve mentioned the Law of Attraction quite a lot over the last few months but I’ve not really covered it in any great detail. I’ve found that the more I learn about it the more little insights I get about what it is, and more often, what it isn’t.

In this post I’ll give my own thoughts about what my understanding of the Law of Attraction is and in further posts I’ll add some insights that will hopefully clarify some points, and perhaps myths, a little more.

What is the Law of Attraction?

In a nutshell it is a universal law which states that “that which is like, shall be drawn unto itself”. That quote by itself doesn’t mean very much but the essence of it in our everyday world is that we tend to attract what we focus on, whether we believe in the Law of Attraction or not. It often works rather like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Have you ever noticed how some people manage to attract the same circumstances over and over - one abusive husband after another, one patronising boss after another, one illness after another and so on. On the more positive side, there are some people that just appear ‘lucky’ - they attract all the good stuff into their lives and everything just seems to work out well for them.

Teachers of the Law of Attraction tell us that it is a universal law, which means that it operates without our having to believe in it - rather like gravity. They say that it is based upon a power that is beyond each of us individually but that we each have the power to create our own reality of life by the choice of the thoughts that we focus upon.

How Does the Law of Attraction Work?

That’s the tricky bit! If you read some of the more technical texts you will hear theories about how it is rooted in metaphysics. Personally, I find that this stuff goes way beyond my understanding but the basis of it seems to be rooted in energy. Everything in the universe is energy in some form or another. Even a basic study of the sciences teaches us that energy can never be created or destroyed and that it merely changes form. We are humans and yet we are also forms of energy, and so is the computer you are using right now, and the clothes you are wearing, and the buildings you occupy, and the food you eat and so on.

The theory is that energy vibrates and that the thoughts we think vibrate on different frequencies and so thoughts of anger are vibrationally different to thoughts of compassion. I’m sure you’ve all had the feeling of meeting somebody new and taking an instant shine to them, or perhaps the opposite where you dislike somebody but you don’t know why - they just give you ‘bad vibes’.

And of course, I’m sure we’ve all had experiences where we can pick up on the mood of another person without them having to say or do anything. We can just sense if somebody we know is in a particularly bad mood for instance. How do we do this? Some kind of intuition probably. But the theory is that we pick up on these vibrations that other people emmanate.

Like Attracts Like

The theory of the Law of Attraction is that whatever we are predominantly vibrating tends to attract other similar vibrations which means that we attract people who have similar thoughts as us, we attract circumstances and events that match what we are thinking etc.

Of course, much of this can occur naturally. For example, somebody might be looking for a job and see one he wants to go for but he holds the belief, “I’m not good enough for that job” and so he goes to the interview with a sense of unworthyness and he does not exude confidence. The interviewers can probably detect the attitude of this candidate and they want somebody who is confident and so they don’t offer him the job which enforces his belief even more.

Is this Law of Attraction or just a self-fulfilling prophecy? Perhaps a little bit of both. But where the Law of Attraction is more appealing is when we are taught that we can use it to attract specific things to us - such as the perfect soulmate. The idea is that if we focus on what we want and get specific in our thinking, that eventually it must be attracted to us - it is law.

Why Then, Are We Not All Happy?

Surely if all we need to do is just focus on what we want and we get it then why are we not all living every day of our lives in pure bliss and abunance? With every desire, there is also its opposite - the lack of it. If you want money, the opposite is the lack of money. If you want health the opposite is sickness, disease and injury. If you want love the opposite is lonliness and so it is with everything.

The problem is that humans have a tendency to think about what they don’t want, they think about all the things that are going wrong in their lives, and what might go wrong in the future. They tell their friends all their woes and thus keep their attention firmly on the things that they don’t want. Globally, this is perpetuated even further with the doom & gloom media. The average newscast on TV tends to spout primarily a message of disaster, despair, crises, crime, terrorism, injustice, the list goes on and on but it is rarely good news.

Of course, it’s just plain hard to focus on the good things sometimes. If you’re in debt, it’s difficult to feel and think abundantly. If you’re sick or injured it doesn’t feel natural to think healthy thoughts. When everything around you is negative it takes tremendous willpower to keep your thoughts positive and just on the good stuff - the stuff that you want.

This is the reason that most of us just keep on attracting the same old things - we see what is happening all around us right now and so that is where our attention is, and that is what we vibrate so we just attract more of the same. When things go wrong, everything seems to go wrong at once. The worse it gets, the worse it gets. On the other hand, when we’re on an upward spiral it feels as though we’re being given a helping hand as the better it gets, the better it gets.

The trick, is to focus on only what we want, even when surrounded by the opposite.

Thoughts v Feelings

Most of the teachings that I have studied say that it is not really the thoughts that we think, or the words that we use, but in fact the emotions that we are feeling that really matter. This leads to another problem because often we can say words that are positive but still feel wretched inside and often we find it difficult to shake off those feelings of despair, guilt, loneliness, sadness or whatever it may be, no matter what we say to ourselves.

We know how our emotions feel. We have a ton of different emotions that we feel but we can generally classify them into two broad groups - those that feel good and those that do not. Where do these emotions come from? LoA teachers tell us that these emotions are our internal guidance system and that when we feel good, it is telling us that whatever we are focused on right now is in harmony with our desires - in other words, we’re on the right track so we should continue doing that.

On the other hand, if we are feeling bad, that is an indication that what we are focused upon is not in harmony with our desires so we should stop doing that. Take a simple example - imagine your home going up in flames and losing everybody and everything in it. How does that feel? I’ll assume that all of you would agree that it feels bad. Nobody wants that so our guidance system says “hey, that’s not what you want, why would you think such a thing?”.

I wont try to use a positive example because we all want different things so what feels good to me might not feel good to you but I’m sure you can come up with something that feels good to you.

Law of Attraction Resources

There are now many people who are teaching Law of Attraction techniques but here are a few of the more prominent ones, and those that have been most influential to me.

Esther & Jerry Hicks (Abraham)

Esther Hicks is what is known as a channeller. She talks about the Law of Attraction but her teachings do not come from herself, but from a non-physical entity known only as Abraham. I personally find it difficult to comprehend the whole idea of non-physical spiritual beings but I tend to ignore that and just listen to the message. Jerry Hicks is Esther’s husband and for many years he asked questions of Abraham through his wife, Esther and together they conduct many workshops and have written several books.

I have read all of their Law of Attraction books and I find them extremely practical because they have a great many examples of common situations that we find ourselves in, and how to turn around our thinking to be in better alignment to what we want. They also teach many specific processes such as the daily workshop which is rather like a meditation where for around 15-20 minutes a day you get comfortable, shut your eyes and simply visualise and think about everything that you want for yourself.

http://www.abraham-hicks.com/lawofattractionsource/index.php

Wayne Dyer

Wayne Dyer is a motivational speaker who has been writing books and speaking for over 30 years. Not all of his books are about Law of Attraction, I have started reading some of his very early books and there is no mention of it there but perhaps his most prominent Law of Attraction work is his book, The Power of Intention.

http://www.drwaynedyer.com/

However, Wayne also does a weekly radio show with the online radio station Hay House Radio. This is a wonderful resource - 24 hour free online radio show with all sorts of great guest speakers, one of them being Wayne Dyer. What is especially cool is that if you become a member (costs $48 a year) you have access to all of the archives. There are currently 3 years worth of archives so its great value. There are also several other shows based around the Law of Attraction here.

The Secret Movie

The Law of Attraction has been around for many years though I’m not entirely sure when it was given that name. However in 2006, the movie The Secret by Rhonda Byrne really catapaulted the idea into the mainstream. Personally I love the movie and I have watched it many times as it always makes me feel good but it has a downside too - it has launched the career of many a LoA ‘guru’ and spawned an entire industry around LoA. Just about everybody is teaching it now and of course, like with everything, there is a lot of hype and empty promises out there.

Watching the movie you’ll also find many other motivational speakers featured including Bob Proctor, Jack Canfield, Joe Vitalie, Bob Doyle, John Demartini so from there you can find lots more avenues to explore.

http://www.thesecret.tv/

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, I have a lot more to say on the subject to stay tuned for the rest of this series. Also, if you have any questions about Law of Attraction then please feel free to ask in the comments and if its something I’ve got an opinion on, I’ll try and include it in the series.

Fear of the unknown - it’s one of our biggest fears as humans, probably even more fearful than the fear of change but if you really stop to think about it, it’s a rather silly fear because there no unknown, it’s a myth and doesn’t exist.

Where is the Unknown?

Think about it, when you talk about the unknown, where does it reside? Or perhaps a better question is when? For the purposes of this question I am talking about your own life experience, not those of others which you may never know.

Is it in the past? No, you already know everything that has gone before. You may have forgotten parts of it but everything you remember is known. Is it right now in the present moment? Again, no because right now as you exist in this moment you know what is. So what does that leave? The future. The unknown only occurs in the future and what do we know about the future? It’s another myth that doesn’t exist because as we know, tomorrow never comes. All we ever have is right now, this present moment!

But, But…

When I first had this thought that the unknown doesn’t exist my immediate reaction was to dismiss it as absurd. Of course the unknown is real, I can never know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know where I might be living, or what I might be doing, or who I might be with, and on and on. But all of these are in the future and they are only unknown when we think about a future event from the perspective of the present moment.

Here’s a real world example: I am in the process of house hunting and right now I don’t yet know where I am going to live. So right now, it appears to be an unknown but right now I know exactly where I live and once I buy my new house I will know exactly where I live and here’s the key - with every moment between now and then, I will also know exactly where I live! There will never, ever, be a moment in time where I do not know exactly where I live! Well, unless I’ve been hitting the wine paricularly hard :-)

What Time Period Do You Live In?

The problem for most people is that they don’t live in the present moment. They either obsess over the past, lamenting what once was, beating themselves up and feeling guilty about something that is now over, or they live in the future, worrying endlessly about what might be, what might happen and so on.

When we live in the present moment, many of our troubles disappear. I used to have silly thoughts, along the lines of “what will I do if X happens at Y point in the future?”. Nowadays I can see the futility of worry so I don’t tend to have those but I noticed that if instead of thinking in the future I just bring myself back to the present moment and ask myself, how I am doing right now with things just as they are? I usually find that they are just fine for now. When you take things a day at a time, or even an hour at a time, things can seem much easier than worrying about what might happen in the future and it takes away that fear of the unknown because in the present moment the unknown is gone.

Your thoughts?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Byron Katie as part of Jenny Mannion’s Heroes of Healing group writing project. In the last couple of weeks the project has really taken on a life of its own and has grown tremendously. The project has a new URL, a whole new layout and a load more heroes! Here are some excerpts of some of my favourite ones:

Eckhart Tolle

I discovered Eckhart Tolle from his webcast series with Oprah about his book A New Earth. This was unlike anything I had ever read before and it really changed me profoundly in many ways and allowed me to learn to accept life with a sense of inner peace. Excerpt:

Eckhart’s essence is one of peace as he explains consciousness in accessible terms so everyone can understand. He has caused many people to “awaken” and to think about their life totally differently. His work and talks on the pain body and the roles we play in the relationships in our lives is something I feel most of us can greatly relate to and learn from.

Esther & Jerry Hicks

Esther Hicks is somebody who channels an entity of non-physical beings known only as ‘Abraham’. I don’t know much about channelling but the message that they give has affected me greatly over the last year. Their teachings are based on the Law of Attraction and they have been teaching this stuff for over 20 years, long before the movie The Secret came along. Excerpt:

Abraham teaches that ‘life is supposed to be fun!’ and that we can create our lives however we wish with effortless ease. They impart their wisdom, straight from Source Energy, in a way that is easy to understand and funny all at once. It is this sense of humor that seems to help people digest their teachings without the heaviness of the more ‘serious’ religious tenets.

Louise Hay

Louise Hay wrote a book You Can Heal Your Life many years ago and it has been a best seller ever since. I actually watched the movie before reading the book and I was instantly captivated by Louise’s charm. In her 80’s she is full of life, has an obvious love of life and just exudes confidence. Her teaching are also based around the Law of Attraction but the emphasis is on the mind-body connection. Louise healed herself on cancer in a very short time using her own teachings and many others have gone on to do the same. Excerpt:

As soon as I read Louise ’s story, it was like the sun came out and all of a sudden I could see that every day didn’t have to be cloudy. There was blue sky out there. I realized I had to change myself before I could ever hope to have the life I dreamed of. I desperately wanted to be happy, but the world I lived in was full of pain, criticism and trying to be perfect, and hating myself because I was not.

Wayne Dyer

I have been listening to Wayne Dyer CD’s for quite a few years but it was only in this past year after learning about the Law of Attraction that I really understood his teachings. Nowadays he is one of my favourite people to listen to. I listen to archives of his radio show, The Power of Intention (free from Hay House Radio) almost daily. I can’t get enough of him - he speaks with such simplicity in a very down to earth way that is easy to understand. I prefer his approach to the more metaphysical teachers out there. Excerpt:

With many books, audios and televised events as well as speaking internationally — he has encouraged and helped millions of people find their inner strengths. Dr. Dyer’s books range from his powerful talks on “Intention” to one of his most recent where he gave up most of his belongings for a year and LIVED the Tao Te Ching. He has 7 children and STILL maintains a constant sense of presence and calmness.

At last I come to the final part of my story. At the end of part 11 which was just a few months ago, I was hurting once again from the breakdown of a relationship just six months after being devasted by the same thing.

Going through this twice in six months was harsh but I knew I had to learn and grow as a result of the experience. At first I decided that I wanted to try to protect myself from going through that kind of pain again. I had thoughts such as “I must get better at this LoA stuff so I only attract good things into my life”, and I figured I’d need to attract a relationship that would last my whole life time.

It didn’t take me long to figure out how absurd this idea was. What if I found the perfect person and then she got run over by a bus? It was at this point that I realised that LoA is just one law in this Universe of many and it exists within other laws and most importantly, it only creates our own experience and it doesn’t allow us to control other people. This pain I was going through was due to a relationship with another person and whenever you are involved with somebody whether that’s romantically, professionally, a family member or whatever, you can’t control them and you can’t create their reality for them so if you drift out of alignment then that relationship will suffer or breakdown and that is just life.

It was at this point when I realised that the most valuable thing I could do from this point on is to learn how to deal with the challenges that life throws at us. I had been holding LoA as some kind of saviour but it doesn’t work that way. You can attract great things into your life (and I still haven’t mastered that) but unless you cover every detail of life you will also attract by default on many subjects and that means that everynow and then the Universe will just clobber you around the head! I felt like I hadn’t learned my lessons the first time around so the Universe clobbered me again a second time and said “hey wake up! we’ve something to teach you here!”

Also, life is temporary, people die, companies shut down, friends move away - things change all the time and even if you manage to attract the perfect vision of life into your reality the chances are that it won’t stay that way for long. Therefore I decided that it was far better to learn how to be flexible, how to adapt to changed circumstances, how to deal with pain, how to move on from past hurt and so on.

The last 5 months have been a time of tremendous learning and growth. I read books, I read blogs, I listened to audios, I watched DVD’s and online videos - for several weeks I did virtually nothing but absorb good feeling material into my life. I have now put my life back together and I’m working again, socialising again, and so on but I have chosen to make learning, personal growth and spirituality a permanent part of my life and not a day goes by that I don’t read, watch or listen to something inspiring - usually for at least an hour a day.

I soaked up so much stuff in such a short space of time that I began to feel overwhelmed and felt as though I needed to talk about it. I had questions, I had aha moments and insights. I kept feeling a burning urge to write but I didn’t have a place to write so at first I just journalled but I had a feeling in the back of my mind that I didn’t just want to write for me I wanted to write publically, to invite others to comment, in other words - to blog!

I already had my Internet Marketing blog but that simply is not the place to discuss these kinds of topics so I knew I needed to start a new one but there was something that didn’t feel right, I couldn’t think of a name for a start. I decided to let the Universe guide me and I figured that when the time was right I would know it and I would also know the name.

So I stopped thinking about it for a while. Another thing I did during this time was go for lots of walks - it was summer time and in Essex in the UK where I live there are lots of country parks and coastal areas to explore. All the photos I use on this website are photos I have taken on my walks. I tend to choose remote locations where I can be alone with my thoughts and I would go over in my mind the stuff I had been reading about, listening to and so on.

One day I was in a country park mulling over life, the Universe and everything and feeling somewhat frustrated. Why was life always so hard, why was it always a struggle? I mean, surely life is supposed to FEEL GOOD isn’t it? I stopped dead in my tracks - the name of my blog hit me like a brick and it felt right.

This blog is born…

So that is the end of my story and the start of a new phase of life. I’ve got a lot to do, there are many things I want to change but I am now committed to changing inside as much as the outside. I will never again take things for granted, I will always be grateful for what I have. I will never stop learning and evolving and I will never again be so naieve as to think that ‘happiness’ lies anywhere but inside of me.

I’m not exactly sure where life wil take me but as I learn and grow I’ll be sure to share the journey here

Much of the discussion of the Law of Attraction discusses the first part - how to keep our focus on what we want and not on what we don’t want, but I don’t hear as much about the second part, which is the Law of Allowing. This law states that we need to allow ourselves to be what we are and also allow others to be what they are. This includes allowing others to attract pain and suffering into their lives.

I only recently understood what the Law of Allowing meant - I got it whilst listening to an old Abraham Hicks recording, their Special Subjects series that was recorded 20 years ago! Previously I thought it was just about allowing us to attract what we want into our experience, but I hadn’t realised the significance of how it applies to our allowing of others to be what they are and attract what they will.

I have a chance to put this into practice today as a close friend of mine is currently undergoing surgery to have her gall bladder removed. This particular problem is just one of many physical ailments and injuries that she is wrestling with and when I see the kind of job she does (she is a police officer), the kind of negativity she is surrounded by every day, the amount of anger and frustration she feels at what I would feel are unimportant things, I am not at all surprised she’s under the knife right now but of course it would be natural for me to worry anyway.

However, I didn’t worry and felt calm about it and she’s come out of the surgery just fine so all is well.

When I first started learning of the Law of Attraction I thought of this friend of mine because she’s one of the most stressed people I know and seems to attract a never ending stream of crap into her life. She would seem to be a good example of somebody who negatively attracts. At first I wanted to try and help her but she’s also extremely down to earth and would dismiss any discussion along these lines as pure drivel. It would be a lost cause.

I have another friend who is having a really hard time financially and with both of these friends I kept asking myself what I could do about it to try and help them but eventually I gave up and when I listened to that recording I realised that I hadn’t been much of an allower. On the surface it sounds like being an allower means to simply not care what happens to other people but that’s not the case.

It’s quite subtle really - you can see something negative happening to somebody and care about them and even try to help them in some way if you are able but the key is the emotion you are feeling. If you are feeling their pain then you are not allowing. If you can care without feeling negative emotion and without letting their pain into your experience then you are being an allower.

I remember when I first watched The Secret I saw the sections about world events and it seemed to make sense that having a war against everything would just add more power to the things we were pushing against but it left me with the question, how do we alleviate those situations without just making them worse? Surely the moment we try to do something we are just pushing against the problem?

Not necessarily. First of all its always useful to look at a problem in terms of the desired solution rather than the problem itself. So for example, if you wanted to do something about world hunger you’d be better off joining an organisation that promoted “food for all” rather than one that promoted “end world hunger”. But aside from that, I think the real difference is again in our emotions. If it is possible to observe the problem and work towards a solution without feeling badly about what you are observing then you are making a change whilst still allowing the current situation to be what it is.

I’m not looking to solve the problems of world hunger but at least now I can be there for my friends without allowing their pain to add to my own.

Have you ever noticed how many times you get told that you should be doing or thinking something or other? Oh you should do this, or you should have done it that way instead. That’s not right, this is what you should believe and so on.

We Are Not All The Same

Trying to fit your life around all of these shoulds is very difficult and yet it is what most people do all the time. They seem to come from everywhere - our parents, other family members, friends, co-workers, even the modern media such as the TV and magazines try and tell you what you should be thinking, or wearing, or doing etc.

There is a fundamental flaw with this whole should-mentality: we are all unique and so what is right for one person is not necessarily right for another. Yet in modern society we try to classify ourselves, to conform to some idea of normality, we obey rules which have been set out by authorities and we try to get along with people by agreeing with them when they tell us what we should be doing or thinking or wearing or … the list goes on.

For many people on many subjects there may well be similarities. For example, for many people, getting a ‘good job’ is an acceptable way to earn a living but not for everybody. Some people (like me) prefer to work for themselves, others don’t need to work at all so they don’t, a few people have special lives afforded by their status such as royalty, some might devote their life to religious calling, others might spend their life in pursuit of some kind of goal. I’m sure as you read this list you’ll resonate with one or two of them and you might even have felt a little bit of negative resistance to some of them and all of those emotions are perfectly normal.

There is no right way to live your life, no job that is right for everybody, no set of rules by which everybody should adhere. Life is a choice and it is different for everybody.

How Do You Know What’s Right?

You might be feeling a little overwhelmed at the idea of so much choice. If that is the case then how do we decide how to live? Quite simple - our gut instincts tell us. To me, the idea of going out and getting a job is torture. So is the idea of living in a third world culture. How do I know this? Because when I think about those things they feel bad but when I think about being an entrepreneur and carving out a life of luxury I feel good and remember that life is meant to feel good!

Other people try to impose their shoulds on us and when they do that, we get an emotional reaction. If that emotion feels good then the chances are that their should is probably a worthy should for you too but if it feels bad then it is most certainly not.

The Curse of the People Pleaser

One of the shoulds that many of us hold for ourselves is that we should try to get along with other people - to get along with our families, friends, co-workers, blog readers and anybody else that we come into contact with. The trouble with that is that in our attempts to get along with others we often feel as though we should agree with them, which means adopting their shoulds as our own and as we are all different this is bound to cause conflict somewhere.

What the people pleaser often does is to ignore his own emotional reactions and simply try to go along with other people and their shoulds. This may seem beneficial in the short term because it allows you to agree with those around you but one day you wake up and realise that you are not living a life that really makes you happy and you start to resent those people that told you that you should have done it their way.

How do you please both yourself and other people? You can’t! This is the unfortunate truth. If you look at any situation, any opinion, any belief you will see that it is actually impossible to please all of the people all of the time. Let’s take a really simple example. I once ran a poll on my other blog asking if I should have guest posters or not. Half of the people who voted said yes and the other half said no. How could I please them all? I couldn’t.

Listen To Your Inner Guidance

If you cannot please all of the other people then what can you do? You can decide to listen to your own guidance instead. If everybody in the world attended to their own feelings, stayed in their own business instead of everybody else’s, and looked after their own needs then the world would be a better place!

That is not to say that we should just ignore everybody else. It may well be that other people have much valuable advice to give us but the decision as to whether or not to follow that advice should come from within - by listening to your emotions. Noticed that I just imposed two of my own shoulds on your in that paragraph! You can decide whether or not this post makes sense to you!

Don’t be afraid to change your mind. There have been many times when I have held an opinion on something and after learning new information I changed my mind. Those opinions felt right at the time and such is the way of life - the world is ever-changing and so are we.

In a recent post about goal setting I expressed how I used to get frustrated when my goals always seemed to change and evolve and this is why. Similarly, something what you feel you should do or think or believe right now may not be something that is a should for you in six months time. But as long as you always listen to your inner guidance you should be okay.

Be Careful Of Your Own Shoulds!

Another person who can impose shoulds on you is you! Do you find yourself doing something because you just feel that you should even though you don’t really want to? A great example of this is new year’s resolutions. There are various statistics around but in general a very large percentage of new year’s resolutions are broken within mere day’s of setting them.

Why is this? One possible reason is that many people set their resolutions because they feel they should. I really should stop smoking this year, I should join a gym, I should donate some money to charity and so on. If these things do not feel right to you then you won’t have the motivation to see them through.

Always, ALWAYS listen to that inner guidance - your emotions, and check them regularly!

The bliss that I found with my new partner was very temporary. Only four months later she decided that she no longer wanted to be with me. She gave me some story about her ex but I didn’t really take any notice of that. All I could think about was pondering the question, how did I attract this?

Unlike six months earlier when the breakdown of my relationship came as a complete shock, this time I felt very differently. I didn’t want us to split up but I didn’t fight it at all. I trusted that it was happening for a reason but I was still very confused. I could understand why my previous partner and I had split up because over the course of 10 years we had become very different people but of course that was not the case with this new relationship - nothing would have had a chance to change in just 4 months.

So did that mean that I had attracted the split or did I attract the wrong person in the first place? It slowly became apparent that I had done both. The Law of Attraction can be very complicated at times and when you get it wrong it can hurt! Through a lot of deep reflection I learned many things both about myself and about LoA in general.

Make Sure You Know What You Want

There is no doubt that I got exactly what I wanted. This new partner was everything I imagined beforehand. Also, there were some similarities with my previous partner in that she had a child so all the family stuff that I had been attracting before also manifested. The trouble is, I am not a natural with children. I am not maternal and that was a big problem in my previous relationship.

But here is the major mistake that I made that I didn’t understand for quite some time. When in my previous relationship, in my efforts to ressurrect it I wanted to do more as a family because I knew that was what she wanted. That was my life at the time - we had a child and I had a committment to them. I would never have walked out on them no matter how bad it got. But that was a mistake because I was not happy and I never would have been. Not everybody wants kids, and it turns out that I’m one of the people who doesn’t.

However, I had been attracting a family life and I got it again. My new partner had a child and at first I thought it was exactly what I wanted but I started to notice many problems. I ignored them though as I was so happy with the relationship itself. But a relationship is not just with one person, especially when children are involved. They come as a package, you can’t have the parent without the child.

I had attracted exactly what I asked for, but it turns out that I didn’t really and truly want what I asked for - only bits of it. As I started to look again towards the future I had difficulty fitting in my new partner and her child. We were so very different and at first our differences were fun but after a little while I began to see things differently but of course, I tried very hard to ignore them.

I remember having conversations with friends saying that all that matters is that we love each other and that nothing else matters. I was kidding myself - that’s not all that matters at all!

Be Specific In Your Asking

Many of the differences between us were things that I just hadn’t thought of. My previous partner and I were very similar in lots of ways and that’s probably why we stayed together for so long - we just kind of thought the same way, liked the same things and so on. But I took all this for granted, and when I was busy doing my LoA workshops trying to attract a new partner I never even considered many of these things.

The universe responds to your vibration but if you are not putting out a specific vibration then you are attracting by default. This is why bad stuff happens to good people - they didn’t necessarily attract something bad because they were being negative, they were just plodding along, minding their own business and letting life happen to them.

Everything that I specifically imagined manifested itself in the relationship. It was quite spooky in a way. Even certain decor in her house! But there was so much else that I had given no consideration too. For example, she was messy and I was tidy. I had never even considered this as my ex had always whined at me for being messy! So I got what I asked for, but there was so much I missed out.

This time around I spend time thinking about every little detail. Some things are more important than others of course - being messy isn’t really a big deal but when you have a whole bunch of little things like that they all add up.

The Universe Wants To Teach You

If I hadn’t had that second relationship, I wouldn’t have finally figured out that kids are just not for me. I had had a really good time for 4 months and then I had some pain which was excruciating for a while but it didn’t last. I learnt so much and in my final post in the series next week I’ll talk some more about that but what is clear to me is that this experience, even though it hurt like hell for a while, has put me in a better place now.

I have now got very clear about what I really want from a relationship and when I reflected I noticed that in the 17 years in which I have been in long term relationships, I was only truly happy for 2 of those years. For the other 15 I was settling. That’s just crazy. Why would I do that to myself? Again, the reason was very clear - I have always been quite weak in this area, scared to be alone. I have always stayed in a bad relationship because it seemed easier than being alone. The trouble is that life is too short to do that and I have now promised myself that I won’t do it again.

I very much want a relationship but only with the right person - somebody who really does tick all the boxes. If I hadn’t had this second breakup wake me up I wouldn’t have made that decision and I might have found myself wasting another 10 years with the wrong person.

I am almost at the end of my story. We split up in May and I started this blog a short while later. Join me next week for the last installment!

In the last post I talked about resistance and discussed some ideas for how to release it. Generally speaking resistance is a bad thing - it puts you in a negative mindset and blocks you from getting what you want but are there circumstances in which it can be of value?

The Role of Resistance in the Law of Attraction

I’ve been listening to a lot of Law of Attraction material lately - CDs from Abraham Hicks and archives of Wayne Dyer’s radio show on Hay House Radio. The basic premise seems to be that the only factors that affect the speed of manifestation of what you want are the strength of your desire for it and the amount of resistance around it. Most of us don’t have a problem with the desire part; it’s the resistance that trips us up. We roll around negative thoughts in our heads, we don’t believe we can have whatever it is that we want, we get frustrated with our current circumstances and so on.

So that is why its a good thing to work on releasing resistance and even if you’re not really a believer of Law of Attraction principles, resistance does not feel good so its a good thing to release it because it helps us feel better.

Where’s My Stuff?

There have been many times when I have not had what I wanted but I could see clearly why - because I just couldn’t get that negativity out of my head. I just couldn’t seem to stop focusing on the bad stuff, going over the past, beating up on myself and so on and this also added further resistance into the equation because I knew that all these negative thoughts were just pushing away the things that I wanted.

But over the last few months in particular, the resistance has slowly but surely lessened and my general state of being now compared to how it was just 5 months ago is radically different. But here’s the kicker - just as I start to feel better about everything and focus purely on what I want to manifest for my future and feel good about that, I start to get this nagging voice in my head that’s asking the question, “so where’s my stuff?”

You see, if my desire is strong (it’s red hot!) and I’m feeling good about it and I have let go of all those negative thoughts then surely I should be steaming towards what I want at a very fast pace. And if it has been this way for a while now then why isn’t it here yet? WHERE’S MY STUFF?!?!

Of course, as I’m sure you can see, getting impatient and frustrated is just another form of resistance. Sometimes I feel like I can’t win. On the one hand I know that the better I feel and the less resistance I have the more likely I am to be able to manifest what I want but on the other hand if I feel great all the time then I get frustrated if my desires don’t show up as quickly as I think they should.

Where Resistance Can Be Helpful

I’m living with family at the moment and probably will be for quite a few months. It’s ok but sometimes it can be annoying. My mother is very set in her ways and we see things very differently on many subjects so sometimes we clash and annoy each other a bit. Most of the time it doesn’t bother me and I’m just grateful to have somewhere to live but sometimes I can feel the frustration rising. I’m getting impatient, wanting to have my own place more quickly, or wishing my mother would just see things my way more often :-)

However this frustration is mild, it doesn’t cause me any major negative emotions and is more of a gentle nagging feeling. A walk in the fresh air or a few minutes with a good book usually gets rid of it. So I don’t stress over it too much. I doubt that having a little mild frustration is going to manifest anything disastrous in my life - but it could slow down my manifestations a bit.

This last point made me think that perhaps a little bit of resistance can be helpful. I think there are probably very few people who are absolutely positive 100% of the time and never have any negative emotion whatsoever. I’m sure even the most ‘enlightened’ of beings have some form of resistance now and then. So when I start thinking that I have it all sorted, that I’m totally positive and therefore should be manifesting my stuff at any moment, it’s probably a bit of an illusion.

The problem is that we are often blind to our own faults. So when I feel a little bit of resistance, or more importantly, I notice it, it lets me know that I’m human, that I don’t have it all sorted and this allows me to chill out a little bit and not expect everything to just fall into place overnight. In this way I find it easier to focus on the things that are going well, to notice the little improvements here and there which in turn does make me more positive overall.

Because I am no longer assuming that my vibration is 100% positive I am not expecting everything to manifest itself instantly so it allows me to relax and just let things come in their own time scale. Basically, it allows me to stop getting impatient and yelling, WHERE’S MY STUFF?

One of the things I have been trying to do on an emotional level lately is to release resistance so I’m not always “fighting against” something. They said that what you resist persists and I have certainly found that to be true in my own life.

What is Resistance?

Emotionally speaking, resistance is not wanting something and more importantly, not accepting that it is there. We tend to resist against current circumstances, perhaps an illness that we are suffering, or somebody close to us is suffering. It might be not wanting to be in a particular job, not wanting to be in debt and so on. When we feel resistance it feels bad. The more I fight against something the worse I feel.

Acceptance and Change

The opposite is resistance is acceptance. Now there is a very subtle difference between acceptance and tolerance. Let’s say you are in an abusive relationship. The reality of the situation cannot be argued with so you resist it and you feel bad. However accepting the situation for what it is does not mean that you condone the behaviour of your partner or that you should tolerate it.

To tolerate something is to put up with it despite the negative emotion that lies underneath it. This does not feel good. There are many situations that we resist against that we have some power to change, though often this change would take time. If you are in an abusive relationship, in a career you hate, are recovering from some injury or surgery, there is some action that you can take to make a change to ease the situation for the future but that change will not happen overnight. What happens in the meantime?

That is where you can make the choice between resistance and acceptance. I’ve mentioned before that fighting against the current situation is futile because right now in this moment, what is, simply is and so to fight against it is pointless. The key to inner peace is to accept the current situation whilst doing whatever is within your power to make a change.

How to Release Resistance

I have certainly found myself increasingly able to release resistance and accept what is, but I’m not sure I can explain in words exactly how do to it but I’ll try :-) First of all, I would look at the situation and see what, if anything, could be done about it. I always like to start from a practical level. I would look at what I could do about a situation, plan out how I was going to do it and that in itself would make me feel better because at least I knew that I was doing whatever I could.

At that point, the rest was out of my hands. I’ve had many situations where I had very little control over the thing that was given me the resistance. For example, when I went through a relationship breakup, I had no control over what my partner did, or felt, or thought. There was nothing I could do about that. I could change my own behaviour but that is only one half of the equation in a relationship.

Once you get to the point where you have identified what you can do, if anything and figured out how and when you’re going to do that, there is nothing left but to accept the situation.

I found that the resistance usually manifested itself in one of two ways. It was either as that little ‘voice in the head’ that Eckhart Tolle talks about or it was simply a feeling - an emotion that would feel bad. The voice in the head used to be a big problem for me but I actually find this easier to deal with than just raw emotion because I can reason with it and if that fails I can quieten it.

Quietening The Voice in the Head

If you have a chatterbox in your head who drives you nuts going over and over the same stuff in your head then see if you can learn to quieten it down. I do this simply by concentrating on something else. You can concentrating on your breathing, or a background noise such as the traffic, a ticking clock, the hum of an electrical appliance and so on. If you practice this you’ll notice that the voice was quiet for a moment. It might just be a few seconds at first but its a start. I have been practicing this for several months and I have found that not only am I able to shut that voice up almost the instant it arises, but it simply doesn’t arise anywhere near as much any more.

Dealing With a Bad Feeling

Other times I don’t get the voice but just that feeling. This can feel like all sorts of different things - an eerie nagging feeling that something is not right, restlessness, frustration, or sometimes something much darker like a feeling of dread, fear or intense loneliness.

I used to just use distraction to try to get rid of the feeling - watching TV for example but I always found that to be short lived. It would temporarily cover up the emotion but it was still there waiting for me. My new approach is to try to look at the feeling. This is hard to describe. When I notice something I try to sense if I can feel it physically and usually I can. For example I have found that I feel loneliness in my chest, sadness in my throat, guilt in my stomach and stress tends to sit in my shoulders.

Once I can feel where in my body the feeling is, I just try to watch it and let it be. This is something else that is difficult to describe but I guess it is simply doing nothing - not trying to distract yourself, not trying to feel better by directing your thoughts, but simply sitting (or lying) quietly and watching the emotion for a while it can lessen a little. Over time, I have found that the feelings have lessened more and more.

I was caught up in extreme anger for quite a while. I felt as though my partner should have given us more of a chance. At the time I didn’t see that we’d already had 10 years so a few more months wasn’t going to make any difference. I refused to see any alternative to a future with her, I refused to accept that maybe we had been making each other miserable for far too long and splitting up was the best thing for both of us.

I did not behave very well in this time. I constantly phoned her up, begging her to take me back, then I’d go into rages and say terrible things, I would cry and beg and I just became a pathetic wreck.

One day about 5 weeks after the split I hit a particularly low point and that evening I decided to make one last ditch attempt to get my partner back. I phoned her up and used absolutely everything I could think of to get her to change her mind. Then something strange happened, rather than just saying no she hesitated and said it was too much to think about and that she needed some time and would have to call me back.

As soon as I put the phone down I knew I was making a mistake. Suddenly I was faced with the actual possibility of a reconciliation and I saw it in a very different light. Too much damage had been done, I was very hurt and she was in love with somebody else. There was absolutely no way we could go back and I knew it. I felt sick for about an hour and then phoned her back, apologised and said that was the end of it – no more, it was over.

Finally I felt some relief, I was able to accept that it was over and had to figure out how to move on with my life. I figured that much of what I wanted out of life could be had with friends and that a relationship was not all that important – especially when it was in the state that ours had been in.

The next morning for the first time since the split I knew that I was going to be ok. Then something very, very strange happened – I met the person who I was going to fall in love with and have a wonderful new relationship with!

Within 24 hours of releasing all that negative emotion and just letting go, my new partner came into my life. That moment really cemented within me the idea that the Law of Attraction is real. 24 hours!!

My new partner, I’ll call her ‘A’ was wonderful and I felt things that I had not felt in many years. Before my previous partner, (I’ll call her ‘E’) and I had split up I had been visualising a future that involved my partner and our child and how I wanted life to be. I felt the emotions I wanted to feel and I saw us doing things and going places and having fun as a family.

At the time I had wanted to experience that lifestyle with E but it could not happen because we were not in alignment with each other but Law of Attraction brings you experiences that match what you are thinking and feeling about. I couldn’t get that with E but that is exactly what I attracted with A. She had a child too and it was almost as if I had replaced one family with a new one.

Unfortunately, my new-found bliss was to be very short lived, only 4 months in fact. Tune in next week (oh gosh I sound like a radio show!) to find out how it all went horribly wrong and why I think that is! I’m close to the end of my story now… :-)

Have you ever had a situation where something is about to happen, and it might turn out well or not so good but in the meantime you just want to know? It feels like you just can’t take the suspense? You just need to know one way or the other? What IS that?

When I was a child my 4-month old kitten went missing and I was incredibly distraught. Obviously I wanted the best outcome, I wanted to find her and bring her home but it was the not knowing that was really eating me alive. As the days drew on I just wanted to know one way or the other what had happened to her. If she had been run over then I just wanted to know. I remember on the first day she went missing I told my mother that I wasn’t going to bed until she was home! I would be damn tired now if I had stuck to that one! It was over 25 years ago and I never knew what happened to her.

This morning I’ve just got into one of those situations where something is happening, and it might go either way - good outcome or not so good. I’m actually fine with it going either way but i feel like I just really want to know! I don’t know when I’m going to find out what the outcome is. Hopefully it shouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks but it might be several months! What is this need to know?

I decided to do a little bit of inward questioning to see if I could figure out what was going on and to see if I could give myself a bit of peace. I asked myself, if I knew today that it was a positive outcome, would I do anything differently today? No I wouldn’t, nothing would change today. Similarly, if I knew today that it would be a negative outcome, would I do anything differently today? Nope! And would I do anything differently if I went the rest of the day not knowing? Well no! So if it makes no difference what the outcome is and makes no difference whether or not I find out today, then what on earth am I getting in a tizzy over?

I don’t know!

There’s a kind of excitement at the possibility of getting a good outcome but there’s also a kind of excitement right now, just playng with the possibilities in my mind. I decided that all I could really do was simply notice what I was feeling and become okay with it. So I sat for a while, took some deep breaths, and just noticed that uneasy feeling, that wanting to know, and decided to just let the emotion be. After a few minutes it began to pass but it keeps popping back in again!

It’s just like that feeling when you’ve been on a job interview and you’re waiting to find out if you’ve got the job or not. You’ve already prepared yourself either way but t’s just that not knowing that gets to you. You feel like you’re in limbo until you know what the outcome is.

I’m sure other people get this. I’d love to hear about your experiences with it! Do you experence this feeling? Have you found a way to get comfortable with it?

My friend Jenny Mannion who writes the wonderful blog, Heal Pain Naturally wrote to me to ask if I would participate in her group writing project, Heroes of Healing. The idea is simple - a group of bloggers writing about people who have been heroes (or heroines in my case) of a healing process, be it emotionally of physically. I have several of these heroes and have already mentioned them but I chose to write about Byron Katie for my contribution.

My Healing Journey

Since starting this blog I have been posting weekly chunks of my story that has lead me to the point of going through two major crises within six months and starting this blog. I reached such a low point that I knew that the most important thing I could do for myself would be to learn how to cope with the pain that life throws at you. Often we try to escape our pain, or arrange our lives so that we don’t suffer from any more pain but that kind of thinking tends to cause us to live our lives in fear. Instead I felt it better to accept that sometimes life sucks and find a way of learning how to surrender to life and how to cope on an emotional level.

I had several ‘heroes’ during this time and one of them was Byron Katie. Her book, I Need Your Love, Is That True? was one of the most transformational books that I read in that time and it was also the most relevant to the situation I was going through.

Byron Katie & The Work

Katie (as she prefers to be called) has created a process called The Work which is a process of inquiry where we question our thoughts to determine whether or not they are true. Katie believes that our emotional pain is caused by believing our thoughts, many of which simply aren’t true. The process is very simple and yet, so very powerful.

The questions are:

1) Is it true?
2) Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3) How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
4) Who would you be without the thought

She then invites you to turn the thought around. These questions seem simple but when asked against the right thoughts they are capable of creating an ‘aha’ moment that releases you from the prison of your own thinking.

Katie was recently interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and she did The Work with Oprah. Oprah chose to use her weight as the issue. The first step is too find the thought that causes the pain and Oprah decided that it was “my body is too big” which I’m sure is a thought that many of us can relate to. So Katie asked if it was true and Oprah blurted out “Yes it’s true!” but to the second question she hesitated a little bit. Could she absolutely know that it was true that her body was too big? Of course the answer was no.

Slight digression here but this concept has also been touched on by Eckhart Tolle who says that everything is just as it should be and how do we know that? Because that’s what it is. We say things like, my body is too big but what does that mean? Too big to survive in? Obviously not or we’d be dead. Back to Byron Katie & Oprah…

Eventually Oprah had to admit that she couldn’t absolutely know that her body was too big and was able to move onto the next question. When she believed that thought it created a lot of stress and worry, particularly over food. If she didn’t have the thought she concluded that she would feel peace instead of stress.

Why Is The Work Effective?

If you have a look at your own thoughts that are causing you pain you will find that many of them are arguing with “what is”. My partner should not have left me, I should not have cancer, I’m poor, my sister should not be in prison, I hate my job, my mother should love me etc etc. All of these are caused by somehow fighting with current reality and that is always madness. We cannot fight with what is, because what is, just is!

There are many spiritual teachers who teach this message that you cannot argue with reality but the trouble is that many of us do it anyway - it’s human nature! Although I had read this many times before and I understood it on an intellectual level that did not help me stop doing it. I still kicked and screamed in frustration about my current circumstances.

Byron Katie was the first person I encountered who actually provided a practical, workable process that showed me exactly HOW to stop arguing with reality. When we realise that many of our thoughts just aren’t true and that believing them just turns us into stress-monsters, it becomes easier to slowly let those thoughts go. Even if it doesn’t happen overnight it opens a door because every time that thought pops into your head again it doesn’t have as much power as before because inside you know it isn’t true.

Byron Katie’s Story

As with many of our great teachers of today, there is a story behind the person that is there today. In the 80’s Katie suffered from severe depression and self loathing. She hated herself so much that she slept on the floor because she didn’t feel worthy enough to sleep in a bed. She didn’t leave the bedroom except to use the bathroom, her life was a mess. Then in 1986 one morning she got her wake up call. In her words:

I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always.

The transformation that followed was dramatic and swift and those around her could not fail to notice. People began asking her what her secret was and she began to help others question their thoughts in the way she had questioned hers. Over time this process of inquiry became known as “The Work” and is what she teaches today.

What I Learned From Byron Katie

The most profound thing that I learned from Byron Katie is that there is some entity inside of me (I call him my little demon!) that LIES to me. He puts thoughts in my head which are designed to hurt me and these thoughts simply are not true. I also learned that I didn’t need to believe these thoughts - just because they were in my head didn’t mean that I had to own them and make them mine.

Byron Katie Resources

• Official Byron Katie website
• Oprah’s 3-Part interview series
• The Work YouTube Channel
• Books: Loving What Is, A Thousand Names For Joy

Many thanks to Jenny for running this Heroes of Healing project - do be sure to check it out as there are a great many other heroes that are being covered including many of my other favourites such as Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer & Esther Hicks.

In the last installment of my story I was on a high after discovering the Law of Attraction and I had spent two months visualising the new life I wanted to create for myself but this high did not last.

Just two months later my partner of 10 years announced (seemingly out of the blue) that she wanted us to split up and my whole world collapsed. I knew we had problems but I thought that we were on the brink of resolving them. I couldn’t understand how what had manifested was actually the complete opposite of what I was trying to attract. I’m not going to re-hash the whole story but at the time I was utterly devastated and it turned my life upside-down. I moved out, went to live with family, and later sold my half of the house to her.

After some of the pain subsided I began to question it. My first thought was that this Law of Attraction thing was just a load of <insert rude word> but I had a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that it wasn’t and that somehow I had attracted this. I began to wonder what I had done wrong. I had been so clear in my visualising - I had seen us as a family, doing things together, going places, getting on better than we had before and I just couldn’t see how I could have been attracting the exact opposite.

Underlying this was another thought that kept creeping into my head and I kept pushing it away. I began to wonder if we had simply reached the point in our relationship where there was no hope and so this future that I was visualising could not possibly be with her. You create your own reality but when that reality involves another person then you both need to be in alignment with each other. We had been growing apart for many years and we were clearly heading in different directions. I didn’t want to accept this at first because I was vigorously fighting against the split and constantly trying to get us back together but over the next few weeks it became obvious that this was indeed why we’d split up.

This whole experience was painful and confusing but it started to teach me more about Law of Attraction. The first lesson is that you cannot attract a particular person. Think about it logically - if it worked that way what would happen when thousands of people all attracted the same hot celebrity for instance? The way it works is that your vibration emits a certain energy that attracts other things that match that vibration.

When you want an experience with a particular person, it is not the person that matters, it is the experience and the feelings that go with it. It’s very easily to be confused about this. In my case I was tempted to assume I wanted to be in a relationship with my existing partner because we had been together so long but what I really wanted was what that situation gave me - familiarity, that feeling of knowing each other inside out, getting on with all your partners friends & family and so on.

For a few weeks I was a complete mess but I wanted to get myself out of the hole I was in and the only way I had of making myself feel better for a few moments was when I managed to concentrate long enough on an alternate future that felt good. Thankfully, my intense misery only lasted 5 weeks as relief was just around the corner.

I’ve been working far too hard lately - working through the evening until I go to bed and I figured that I really shouldn’t just work all the time so I decided to make time for some recreation and I dug out a computer game to play on my PC.

Games are a resource hog (well the kinds of games I play are!) and so is Firefox so I had to close that down and just as I was about to shut it down I had a thought: I’m registered with an Internet dating site (yeah you can laugh!) and if I leave a browser tab open it leaves me logged in so I appear ‘online’ when other people login to the site. I noticed that I get a lot more messages if I leave myself logged in so I tend to just leave it open all the time.

So just as I was about to shut down Firefox it occurred to me that I’d be logged out of the site and as it was the evening, that is the time when people generally log on and browse the other people online so of course I thought, “oh no, if I’m not logged on my soulmate might not find me today!” Before I had even finished thinking it, my mind responded with “ugh whatever, I don’t care anymore”, and I shut down the browser.

Just then I noticed what happened - I didn’t care! I thought about it, was that true? Yes it was! I actually didn’t care. I know I’ll meet somebody at some point and at that moment I just wanted to play my game. I held that feeling for a while and I could feel the relief. The attachment was gone, I was no longer feeling desperate.

This morning is the same so I know a shift has happened which is great news but unfortunately I’m not really sure why. It could just be a matter of time. My last relationship ended four months ago which really isn’t very long and most of that time I have still been pining over my ex and I was not in a position to get into a new relationship anyway but I can see that as the time as passed I have gradually felt better and better about the situation.

However I’m not sure that it is as simple as that because I have been using time in a negative way. I’ve had thoughts run through my head such as, I don’t want to be single at Christmas, or even worse - on Valentine’s day and thinking that if I’m still single when I buy a home I’m going to be living all on my own and will be lonely. If a lot of time passed I’m sure my mind would start saying stuff like - why are you still single after all these months / years?

So, I doubt that it is not just time which has resulted in my shift. There are two other things that it might be. A couple of weeks ago I started reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Now I have to say that after A New Earth, I have found this book to be quite hard going. The truth hurts. Eckhart talks a lot about attachment and in particular, being attached to the idea that we need another person to be fulfilled and I could sense the resistance rising within myself when I read it but the more I have read the more I have felt at ease to perhaps Eckhart’s message is getting through.

Secondly, at the same time I also started experimenting with meditation. I haven’t been particularly good at it as I find my mind keeps wandering all over the place but I’ve done around 15 minutes most days and I have felt quite peaceful when doing it so that could also be a contributing factor.

Really though, I think its a combination of all these things. I have always known that being attached to the idea of finding the ‘perfect’ relationship was not particularly healthy and wanted to lose that attachment so every day I read, watch and listen to material that moves me towards this. My favourite authors right now are Wayne Dyer, Esther Hicks, Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie. All these people have different things to teach but one thing they all have in common in their teachings is that everything we need is inside of us - nothing ‘out there’ can make us happy and that is the concept I have been living and breathing over the last four months.

It’s been a struggle sometimes and I would get very frustrated with myself that I hadn’t reached this ‘enlightened’ state that so many people talk about. I even posted about how I had decided to accept my non-acceptance! What I can see now is that back in May I started on a new path (I’m almost at that point in my weekly story series so I’ll explain all that later) but this is such a different state of mind to what I have ever been in before that it was unreasonable to expect to just radically change all my thinking in just a week or so after 36 years of conditioning.

It takes a while, its a gradual progression but as I have just seen, these little shifts are possible and sometimes a thought pops in your head which shows you the evidence of that shift taking place. So if you’re in a place of frustration right now, just keep at it and try not to be so hard on yourself.

I used to be an avid goal setter but I had many problems with the method I was using and after I discovered Law of Attraction I stopped setting goals because I didn’t want the deadline to keep me focused on the fact that I hadn’t yet reached the goal. However, yesterday I read something that sparked my thoughts in this area again and I have now set some new goals, but in a different way to before.

Are Your Goals Working For You?

It is said in many popular success literature that something like 99% of the population do not have any form of written goals and those 1% that do are far more likely to succeed simply because they have set the goal. Well I set goals for many years and a lot of the time they didn’t work out all that well for me. Here are some of the problems I encountered, see if they resonate with you…

The Big Goals Always Changed

Another message we are taught is to think big and so I remember doing goal setting exercises where I would furiously brainstorm the biggest, wildest goals I could imagine. My problem was that I could never seem to stay focused on these goals for very long, they always seemed to change and I couldn’t understand why.

Now I know that it is probably because I was trying to set some massive life long goals that were supposedly tied in to my life purpose but because I couldn’t find a life purpose that would satisfy me for that long, the goals didn’t fit either. I was setting a goal that was so big that it didn’t really resonate with who I was at that time.

I Found It Hard To Work On Some Goals

There were some goals that just seemed like a lot of effort, they were hard. I groaned when I thought about them, they whole thing just seemed like a constant struggle. I now know that these goals were not really aligned with what I deeply wanted for myself, but what I thought I ought to set as a goal. For example, I used to set goals such as “learn to speed read” and “read x number of personal development books”. Why? I don’t know! Because it just seemed like a good thing to work towards. Interestingly, I read a great post last week by Scott Young that teaches us to know when to stop reading a book. I could have done with that advice a few years ago!

I used to think about the person I wanted to be and I made up all kind of assumptions in my head about what sort of achievements that person would have. So I would set arbitrary goals that fit in with that ideal but it was all externally driven and didn’t come from inside me. I think a lot of people do this. If you are constantly struggling with a goal ask yourself if it is something you really want to do, or just something you think you should do?

Stopping smoking is a great example. There are many people who smoke and feel like they shouldn’t so year after year they set themselves the New Year’s resolution to quit and they fail year after year. If you really and truly want to quit smoking you will. My mother smoked for over 50 years and she had all sorts of health problems as a result. When she had a heart attack the doctors told her she had to quit smoking but she didn’t.

She has stopped now and do you want to know why? Because she was fed up of cleaning up the yellow stains on the walls of her house caused by the cigarette smoke! The health warnings weren’t enough for her - it wasn’t until she found a reason that truly came from within her (she’s extremely house-proud!) that she quit and when she decided to do it, it only took a few months.

I Had To Constantly Re-Plan After Setbacks

The goal achievement process usually goes something like this - you set your goal and set yourself a deadline for its achievement and then you start to break it down time-wise. So let’s say its a year long goal - you might start breaking it down into 3-month blocks and then for the current block you’d break it down into monthly goals and then each month you’d take your monthly goal and break it down into weekly ones.

This problem with this is that it is completely linear - one thing follows on from the next and when something along the way doesn’t work, everything that follows it had to be tweaked in some way. A great example of this is a weight loss goal as that is so easy to break down. You set your target weight, and calculate how much weight to lose per month or week or whatever and you’re set. But as soon as you have a slip (and believe me, you will!) your whole schedule has to shift.

Law of Attraction & Goal Setting

The idea behind the Law of Attraction is that you will attract into your life experiences that match what you are focusing on most of the time. The problem for most people is that they focus on the opposite - on what they have right now, on the problems they have, on the stuff they want to get rid of, on stuff they don’t want.

For example, people who want to lose weight look in the mirror and focus on the excess weight that they don’t want and attract more of that excess weight. People who want more money look at their bills and their debt and attract more bills and more debt.

The idea of a goal is that it should motivate you and keep you focused and that seems to fit in with with LoA. But what I found is that most material about goal setting encourages you to set ambitious goals, to be daring, to push yourself beyond your comfort zones. I remember when I was losing weight at one point I decided to change my goal and try to lose weight at twice the rate I had done so before. I failed.

The problem with this thinking (this doesn’t apply to everybody of course) is that when you push yourself in this way you are constantly having to check on your progress, in your head you are asking “have I done it yet?” and when the goal is too ambitious it makes you stressed and it causes your focus to actually be on the fact that you haven’t acheieved it yet, rather than on the desired outcome of the goal itself.

A Laid Back Approach to Goal Setting

With these issues in mind I decided to set some goals in a different way to how I had done so before.

I Only Set Short-Medium Term Goals

I only set goals that I could really see myself achieving as the person I am right now. I have dreams in the back of my mind that I would like to achieve but I know that I would need to be a different person to achieve them and that those dreams are not something I want to work on right now, today. For example, I’ve always had a vague dream that I’d like to write a book one day and I used to have goals like this written down but I know it’s not something I want to do right now. The desire is not there, it’s only a wish and if I tried to push myself to start now I would just get frustrated, give up and possibly destroy a dream that still has possibility in the future.

I Only Set Goals I Really WANT

All the ’shoulds’ are out! I thought about it for a long time and I could only come up with a few because most of them either fell into the category above or they were just ’should goals’ which I know didn’t really inspire me. All the goals I have set I things that I really, really, REALLY want to achieve!

I Only Set Goals I have Control Over

Byron Katie has a saying that there are three types of business in the world - your business, everybody else’s business and God’s business. I don’t use the word God but I think of this as the Universe, or consciousness or whatever. The point is, all we can really do is concentrate on our own business yet so many of us spend far too much time in everybody else’s business and get stressed over stuff which is just God’s business.

For example, I’m not in a relationship right now and I would like to be but that is not my business. There is nothing I can do to work on that, I can’t break that down into weekly tasks! Even if I met somebody I liked, I can’t control how that other person feels towards me - that’s their business. So I haven’t set a goal like that.

Another example is that I’d like to buy a house and on the surface that seems like a reasonable goal but when I thought about it some more I realised that there are simply too many factors out of my control. The housing market, the other people in the buying and selling chain and so on. I’ll get a house when a get a house and there’s not a lot I can do to hurry it up so I didn’t bother setting a goal. If I wanted to, I could set a goal to put myself in a position to be able to buy as that would be totally in my control.

I Picked Worse-Case-Scenario Deadlines

This one goes against conventional wisdom but I had already figured out that deadlines that put me under pressure did not work for me and did not fit in with the way that Law of Attraction works. Now I didn’t just pick some arbitrary date out of the air to get myself off the hook either. Remember that every one of the goals are something that I absolutely want, they are extremely important to me, they are my ‘musts’. So for each one, I asked myself when is the latest possible time by which I really must achieve this?

For example, probably my most important goal is to earn a full-time income from my Internet business. Without that I will eventually run out of savings. So I did some calculations and figured out exactly when I would run out of savings given the worse-case-scenario and that’s my end date for the goal. Now obviously I want to achieve the goal much, much sooner than the date I have set.

Setting the date in this way gives me several advantages. Firstly, because it’s quite far out, I’m not constantly asking myself “have i done it yet?” so I can keep my focus on the goal and not on the lack of it. Secondly, it allows for those times when life gets in the way - you know, always. Stuff happens, things go wrong but if its a goal we really want then we keep going but if the deadline is too tight then everything gets messed up.

Of course there is a downside too - there is always a chance that with a deadline that is a long way off (I have given myself more than two years for one of them) that I’ll lose focus along the way but I found a nice post by Jonathan Mead from Pick the Brain about how to stay committed to long term goals.

I’m Using GTD-Style Action

GTD stands for Getting Things Done, and was created by David Allen. It is essentially a time management system. Now I don’t particularly follow the system but there is one aspect of it that I really like and that is, David says that in order to keep things moving with our goals we should constantly be asking the question, “What’s the next action?” If we do that all time, we’re always making progress.

To me, that is far superior than the goal yearly / quarterly / monthly / weekly breakdown that I described earlier. This also allows flexibility because if something important comes along that can move you towards your goal that you hadn’t thought of before, you can get on with it without it screwing up your plan.

I have decided to use a compromise. For each of my goals I want to make sure that I made progress every month so I set one mini-goal for the current month for each one of them and I have all those written down so I can see at a glance the stuff I want to get done in the current month. Then each week, I have a look at the monthly list and see what I can do in that week to get the monthly goal done. I don’t break it all down into weeks, I just take each week at a time to keep it flexible.

This way I can be constantly moving towards my goals without worrying about something happening along the way to mess it up, because I can just deal with that when it happens and keep going.

Your Thoughts?

A lot has been written about goal setting so I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Do you set goals? Do you have a system for doing so? How has that worked out for you so far?

At the end of part 7 I growing increasingly dissatisfied with my new job and my desire to quit and go back to self employment was burning stronger and stronger. I was becoming deeply engrossed in Internet Marketing and then in the summer of 2007 I heard of something called the Thirty Day Challenge. Funnily enough, the last post I wrote on my IM blog was the wrap of the 30DC for 2008!

Anyway, in a nutshell the 30DC is a course about Internet Marketing and I took the course but there several special things that happened to me during the challenge. First of all, there was a special something about the guy behind the challenge - Ed Dale, I couldn’t put my finger on it but I knew I wanted to meet him. He lived in Australia and I live in the UK but never mind. The other thing was that I got really excited about the challenge, or the potential that it held.

I knew, just knew from my very soul that I could make a living online. I didn’t know if the 30DC techniques were the vehicle (they’re not, as it turns out) but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t stay in the day job any longer, and on the 22nd August, before the challenge was over and before I even earned a single dollar I handed in my resignation!

A week later, Ed Dale came to London to meet up with local challengers, I jumped on a train and got to meet him! At the time I didn’t see the significance of this but now I know that was Law of Attraction working for me. Stranger still, it was at this meet up that I learned about Law of Attraction.

There were about a dozen people there and I spent quite a while chatting to a guy called Mark Attwood. I’m sure he doesn’t remember me at all but I will always remember him because that conversation I had with him changed my life more radically than anything that came before it. I had actually heard of LoA in passing a few times but I didn’t know what it was.

We were talking about money, online business, success etc and he just asked me, “so, do you believe in Law of Attraction?”. “What is that? I’ve heard of it…”, I asked. He asked me if I had read the book Think and Grow Rich. My jaw almost hit the floor - that was the book that had started my first transformation 5 years earlier. I remember reading it and thinking that I never understood “the secret” that it was supposed to contain. Mark told me to watch the movie, “The Secret” and said it was a modern day explanation of Law of Attraction.

The true realisation didn’t come for another couple of weeks because after the meet up I forgot all about it. However, I had been set on a path by then and a couple of weeks later I came across something about The Secret and then I remembered our conversation. I got the DVD and when I watched it I felt the most amazing series of AHA moments I had ever experienced!

Everything suddenly made sense - I looked back at everything that had gone wrong (and right) in my life, my drinking, the loss of my career, the depression, the dodgy Internet business, University and I could see with such clarity exactly how I had attracted everything that I had ever experienced.

At first I felt a bit angry at myself because knowing this meant that I was responsible but of course, I knew this already because I had already started to take responsibility a few years earlier since reading the books on personal growth. But after I stopped beating myself up I watched the movie again (I’ve watched it lots now!) and then I started to dream…

I spent the the next two months thinking intensely about every aspect of my life and decided exactly how I wanted it to be. I thought about my family, and how I wanted the relationship with my partner to improve. I thought about my relationship with our son and what our family could look like in the future. I thought about my work and business life and of course, money. I thought about what money could buy - travel, adventure, a nice home. I thought about the time I wanted to spend with friends, the sports I wanted to do, the sights of the world I wanted to see and on and on.

Every day I spent time just day dreaming, visualising this future and it felt really good. Finally I felt as though I was in control. I had let go of all my past demons, I had completely changed as a person, I was deliberately choosing my life and I felt as though nothing could stop me from getting everything I wanted.

So you can imagine my shock, disbelief and total confusion when just two months later my world collapsed…

Earlier this week I discussed reasons why we’ll never get everything we want in life and that got me to thinking about the big purpose in life that most of us are looking for. If you have a strong enough purpose you’re sure to succeed in life right? If you know exactly what your purpose is then great, you can skip this post but I suspect many of you haven’t found it yet - I haven’t!

Dreams, Goals & Desires & Life Purpose

Most humans (Buddhists are notable exceptions!) go through life expressing desires. As Esther Hicks (Abraham) says, the contrast (what feels good, what doesn’t) in our life experiences give birth to rockets of desire for the things we want to do, be or have. Often these desires start out as fairly vague dreams but then they become stronger and turn into desires, and some of us set goals for their achievement.

How does a life purpose fit into all this? I suppose this is another one of those phrases that could been different things to different people but I see it as one of two things: (1) a very specific but usually very major goal that is expected to take up the most of one’s life, and (2) a way of living or life ethic that guides one’s whole life.

If you think of a goal such as “I want to buy a home”, that is not a life purpose because it is not going to take up the rest of your life, you hope! A goal such as “end world hunger” or “cure cancer” may well become a life purpose as it is unlikely to be achieved within a few years. These are examples of a life purpose that fits into the first category.

The second category is more a lifestyle choice. Steve Pavlina has written about finding purpose in some depth and here is how he defines his purpose:

to live consciously and courageously, to resonate with love and compassion, to awaken the great spirits within others, and to leave this world in peace.

That was written in 2005, he may have updated it since then but it serves as a good example. No matter what Steve does in his life, he can always find a way to live out his purpose. It is a purpose that does not have an end point, it cannot be completed.

Finding Your Life’s Purpose

I know that when I read that article, I tried Steve’s excercise for finding your lifes purpose in 20 minutes and I did come up with something but I wasn’t quite happy with it. That was quite a few years ago and I have thought about it a great many times since then and I have never come up with something that satisfied me and here’s why:

No matter what I came up with, I looked at it and asked myself if that would still be true when I was 50 or 70 or 90 even and I honestly didn’t know. When I look back over my life in just the last few years I have changed so much as a person that I do not recognise myself. When I wrote the first few posts in my story series it felt as though I was writing about somebody else. Because of this, I now feel like I am always changing and so I honestly have no clue what I will be like 5, 10, 20, 50 years from now.

I could come up with a purpose that would suit me now and I could probably see myself in 5 years at a push with that purpose but not much further than that. That’s why I couldn’t come up with anything that deeply satisfied me.

Will You Change Or Not?

I know that there are some people who do not seem to change like I have. Steve Pavlina is one of them. He underwent a transformation in his early life (about aged 20 I think) and since then he has transformed his life and now has an utterly clear vision for how he wants to live his life from this day forth until he dies. However I think that Steve is an exception.

I think that most of us are still learning about ourselves, we’re feeling our way through life, discovering things about ourselves and the world around us. Not only that but we naturally change as we get older. In a recent post I talked about the fear of change and explained that life tends to operate in phases and that we change as people as we move through these phases.

Your Purpose Changes With You

It seems perfectly logical to me that a 20 year old would have a very different vision of life than a 40 year old and again both would see things very differently to a 70 year old but this is not just about age. There is often a change in personality that occurrs due to some negative event in life that causes people to have some kind of “wake up call”. This kind of thing can lead to a radical shift in thinking and in dreams, desires and of course what one would consider to be a life purpose.

For now, I have abandoned the idea of seeking a purpose that will span my whole life. I have some ideas for how I want to live that should stay with me forever but they are more in the background and I wouldn’t consider them to be a purpose as such.

It’s quite reasonable for somebody to have a strong purpose that they pursue with a passion for many years and then it changes some years later. This is what happened to me. From the age of 11 I got hooked on computers and wanted to be a computer programmer. I realised that dream in adulthood and when I got my career back after having lost it some years earlier I started thinking in terms of life purpose and it revolved around software but something about that just didn’t feel right and now I know it’s because the very idea of software was just waning for me anyway but I didn’t know it at the time.

I’m quite sure that my personality and the desires and goals that go with that will shift over the years so now I just go with the flow. I have given up trying to find some purpose that I am supposed to pursue for the rest of my life. Instead I just try to life a life that feels good and see where that takes me.

If you’re still looking for your purpose though, you might find these questions from Think Simple Now to be useful. Even if you don’t find a purpose that fits your whole life, you might discover a lot about yourself.