Omnipotent Power of Thought

2014-06-30T19:23:00.001-07:00

My Book.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/endowed-with-omnipotence-christina-bialas/1119209892?ean=9781452579771

2012-09-25T14:50:00.002-07:00

Is the Power of Thought Real?

2012-09-04T07:16:00.000-07:00

Endowed With Omnipotence: The Power of Your Thoughts Illuminiated, written by Christina Bialas will be available in bookstores late Fall 2012.

The power of thought works flawlessly, but only appears to be a hit-or-miss power when the power is misunderstood. The power of thought works in exact correlation to your predominant thoughts and beliefs. Reality is the manifestations of your beliefs. Consequently, whatever you believe to be a true aspect about your life is experienced (such as I believe I am in financial despair, lonely, or ill). Beliefs are effective discriminators of information and will draw upon you evidence that supports the existing belief. The evidence perceived or reality produced, then serves to further validate the belief, of the effect the evidence seems real. We then become stuck in thought corkscrews which cause us to think, create an effect, and then believe the effect to be true. This process is cyclical unless it is interrupted.

The power of thought is real. We only come to doubt the power when we think we can send out a positively constructed thought or two in an attempt to overthrow our current belief system. The power of thought does not work that way. The power of thought manifests reality according to your predominant thoughts and beliefs, so any attempt to change an experience has to include a change to your beliefs. A handful of fresh new thoughts simply will not do.

Your strongest beliefs and reality are one.  Reality only appears truthful because you have created both the illusion and validation of the illusion. This is similar to hanging a clock on your wall and claiming that clock on your wall is evidence that time exists. Financial disparity, health problems, and lack are all created and supported in much the same manner. The situation is created by your thoughts, and then the situation is pointed to as proof of existence of the condition. In order to change an experience in life, the pattern of think, create the effect, believe the effect must be exchanged for a more constructive pattern.

Every possible experience is available to you right now (prosperity, health, abundance, and happiness). In order to connect with certain experiences, you must focus on the attributes of that experience. For example, you cannot experience prosperity when lack is focused upon. Remember, what we believe, we perceive and what we perceive, we believe.

Think of the game, I Spy. Think of everything that exists in the game, such as a feather, a pink super ball, a steel nail, a yellow duck, and so forth. When playing I Spy, certain objects are immediately perceived, like the pink super ball, yet hours can be spent searching for the yellow duck. Our perception of reality is filtered in much the same way. We concentrate on certain aspects of reality to the exclusion of other aspects. The aspects that we focus on are our beliefs. Consequently, our beliefs blind us quite effectively to other aspects of reality. In a sense, we compress our focus so keenly on certain areas (life experiences) that we are blind to other experiences.

Experiences change when our focus (thoughts and beliefs) is withdrawn from one area and shifted to another. Compared to I Spy, one cannot find the yellow duck if one is not willing to shift focus. Consider what would happen if one by one objects were covered up. Eventually, the yellow duck would appear. Understand that the yellow duck was there all along. The duck only seems to be missing when focus is not directed towards it. Similarly, your perception of reality blocks an abundant life from migrating to you when abundance is kept out of focus and lack is concentrated on.

Reality is like a game of I Spy.  The power of thought manifests our beliefs, without fail and without exception.  If lack and abundance are I Spy pawns in the game of life, and lack is focused on, prosperity has not chance of emerging. To change an experience, your focus (thoughts) must be withdrawn from areas in which change is desired, and placed instead on an ideal outcome. This is the difference between concentrating on the pink super ball and specifically looking for the yellow duck.

Changing your focus is a four step process.

(1) Identify the ideal outcome in an area of your life that change is desired. State exactly what you want to occur. Be clear. Do not settle for comprises, hopeful outcomes or best case scenarios. Be courageous. Be bold. Think big. Know exactly what it is you want in life. Write it down.

(2) Don't restrict your ideals to daydreams. Grease your mind with thoughts so results can take shape. Picture yourself having that outcome, being abundant, or becoming well. Think big. Think often.

(3) Take action! Action cannot be taken out of the equation. Thoughts need action for validation. Recall at the beginning of this blog, I said that beliefs are effective discriminators of information. I also said that we experience our beliefs. The only way to change your beliefs is by taking action on new thoughts. Action builds the foundation of a new belief.  Everything that exists does so because of action taken in follow up to your thoughts. The television sitting in your living room, your relationships, your house, or the car in your driveway exist because physical action was taken with your body. The conscious mind relies on the physical body to take action on the thoughts that are to be physically experienced. The body is your only instrument in the physical world. Leave the body out of the equation, and physical reality cannot be experienced. So to that effect, you must include the physical body in your plan to change outcomes. Being uncertain as to what action to take is normal. Do not overwhelm yourself with thoughts of uncertainty as to what action to take. Do anything. Read a book. Take a car for a test drive. Write the first paragraph of a book. Schedule an appointment. Once action begins, additional thoughts will occur which will propel you along.

(4) The final step in effectuating change requires banishing from your thoughts all forms of negativity, doubt, skepticism, and fear. Think again of our I Spy game. All forms of negative thinking compress thoughts on what already is, in the case of I Spy, our focus remains on the pink super ball. Essentially then we tell ourselves, the yellow duck does not exist because I cannot see the yellow duck. Your experience cannot expand if compression occurs.

The first step to success starts with the two words, I can!

LIVING THE DREAM LIFE

2012-08-31T05:46:00.002-07:00

My book, Endowed with Omnipotence: The Power of Your Thoughts Illuminated is schedule for release late Fall 2012.

Everybody has aspirations of how their life should be. Most of us want super success in areas of wealth, relationships, health and happiness. Yet, continuously our life falls short of those expectations. Other people seem to draw fantastic results effortlessly. Attracting our ideal life is difficult. If thoughts have power, where is that power?

At one time, I doubted the authenticity of the power of thought to provide the results I was after. I thought often of what I wanted, yet what I wanted never materialized. Instead, what I didn't want kept showing up. More bills, more frustrations, and more problems. As I explored the power of thought over the years, I came to understand how the power functions. Thinking about what is wanted is not effective. Believing that you can actually have the product of your thoughts is where the real power resides. Most of us never achieve the belief, and so never achieve our ideal life. Most of us remain stuck in thoughts, wishes, and desires.

The difference between a few sprinkled thoughts and a belief is the difference between the few scattered leaves of fall and a hundred year old maple tree that drops all of its leaves as winter approaches. A few scattered leaves do nothing really to alter the landscape of your yard. Yet a maple that completely drops its leaves saturates the yard and alters the view of the landscape. When we give thought to our ideal life, the thought power lent to comprising the ideal is like a handful of scattered leaves. People who have achieved fantastic success approach their ideal with the thoughts (leaves) of a thousand maple trees.

Examine this tree. Think of each leave representing a thought. Consider how many thousand leaves combine to form this tree. This maple could not exist with only a handful of leaves. The leaves are just as an important to the tree as the tree itself. In fact, the leaves are one with the tree. Your ideal, if we think of it metaphorically, is similar to this tree in that your ideal needs a sturdy trunk (belief) to rise up, represented by thousands of leaves (thoughts) in which photosynthesis (attracted energy) can occur. Photosynthesis in a plant is the absorption of the sun's energy. Photosynthesis of your thoughts, again metaphorically speaking, is the absorption of Universal Energy. A couple of thoughts are not enough to capture the energy of the Universal Mind.

Growing a tree is not that easy, which is exactly why we feel stuck. If growing a tree were easy, forests would not have so much floor space. Trees compete with other trees and plants for sunlight and nutrients. Only the heartiest of trees survive. The beliefs that you have in place right now are mighty oaks. Right now, your beliefs tower over the sprouts of your ideals. Your ideals, then, stand very little chance of rising up. Ideal thoughts, depleted of nutrients, cannot thrive in a forest of deeply rooted beliefs.

Achieving your ideal life boils down to one requirement: You must tend to the thoughts of your ideal. Thinking, I want to be healthy or wealthy, is not enough. A thought must be turned into a belief, if the thought is to stand a chance of towering above deeply formed beliefs. How does one tend to ideal thoughts? By taking action. Action not only validates thinking, but also ensures your thoughts are focused on your ideal because as you act, you have no choice but to think about what you are acting on. Thus, as action occurs thought energy (nutrients, sunshine, energy) is taken from the existing belief and put directly on the ideal. As all of your energy is directed to your ideal, existing thoughts and beliefs wilt.

I will have more to say about action in a upcoming blog.

HELP! I AM STRUGGLING RIGHT NOW. WHAT CAN I DO TO CHANGE MY SITUATION?

2012-08-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

My book Endowed with Omnipotence: The Power of Your Thoughts Illuminated is scheduled for publication late fall 2012. My book describes exactly how the power of thought works.

Regardless of your situation, you can change any experience simply by redirecting your thoughts to a more constructive purpose. Future outcomes can be redirected even if you are deathly ill, heartbroken, or in financial crisis. Changing your future requires an exchange of thoughts.

The requirement of any effective exchange is that something is forfeited that does not serve you in exchange for something that does. Both items or things are not kept. Consider having a pair of uncomfortable shoes that cause blisters on your feet. Off you go to the store to exchange the shoes for a better fitting pair. You do not keep both pair of shoes. Certainly, keeping both pair of shoes serves no purpose. If you continued to wear the uncomfortable shoes, your feet would suffer the consequence of blisters. Alternating between the comfortable and uncomfortable pair causes intervals of pain among episodes of temporary relief. Clearly, ridding yourself of the uncomfortable shoes makes sense.

An effective exchange in thoughts is necessary in order for your pain to go away. You cannot keep both negative and positive thoughts. Similar to occasionally wearing the uncomfortable pair of shoes, your destructive thoughts, metaphorically speaking, will cause mental blisters, of the effect you will continue to experience painful events. If you are trying to rid yourself of destruction, destructive thoughts must be exchanged for constructive thoughts. Think of the lasting effect of occasionally wearing the uncomfortable shoes. Blisters develop that last for days. A switch to the comfortable shoes offers temporary relief. Just as the blisters start to heal, we put the uncomfortable pair back on, and thus start the process of developing blisters all over again.

Thoughts ping-pong through our mind in exactly the same manner, which is why nothing seems to change. We think positively, then negatively. Back and forth thinking is called polarized thinking. The result of polarized thinking is a stalemate. Stalemates offer no change to reality.

Immediate, effective, lasting change requires an exchange in thoughts. All negative thoughts must be banished. The only thoughts permitted are constructive thoughts. Since most of us are unaware of our thoughts as we go about our day, we need to pay attention to our feelings. Feelings are navigators to thoughts. Feelings give us clues as to the health of the conscious mind. When we feel good, our thoughts are constructive. When we feel bad, our thoughts are destructive. Think of the difference between the sickening pit felt in your stomach when bad news is delivered and the radiant glow felt in your stomach when exceptionally good news is received.

Your stomach contains a bundle of nerves that produce the pit or the glow. The bundle of nerves is activated by thoughts. If too much negativity is permitted into the conscious mind, the pit develops. The pit is an urgent warning message to you. The message says, change your thoughts now or the results of destructive thinking will manifest! Conversely, the glow is also activated by extraordinarily positive thoughts. The glow is also a message. The radiant glow says, keep thinking these constructive thoughts. The challenge to us is recognizing feelings as built in thought navigators and heeding their advice.

Thinking constructively by following the radiant glow of your stomach will change your experience. You might have to temporarily endure a few episodes of negativity as your experience changes. Ultimately, enduring a few brief moments of negativity is better than enduring a lifetime of destruction. Experiences shift only when thinking shifts constructively and remains constructive. Just like those shoes that damage your feet, do not be tempted to return to thoughts that damage your experiences.

If you are experiencing dire circumstances, such as a traumatic illness or are in dire financial crisis, I have this to say. Your experience can and will shift if you are willing to take my advice and focus intently on an ideal outcome, not a best case scenario or a hopeful outcome, but an ideal outcome. Exactly what is the outcome that you desire? Lend all of your thought power to that outcome. Up until this point, all of your thought power has been given to the destructive experience you are now facing, which is exactly why the experience is occurring. Continuing to dwell on the experience perpetuates the experience. Problems are solved by focusing on the ideal solution. Problems are not solved by focusing on the aspects of the problem. Exchange your thoughts so that your thoughts focus on an ideal outcome and then do not let up firing those thoughts at the ideal outcome. Faith precedes the miracle.

See also my blog on WHY IS THE POWER OF THOUGHT DIFFICULT TO SUMMON?

WHY IS THE POWER OF THOUGHT DIFFICULT TO SUMMON?

2012-08-29T08:07:00.001-07:00

My book Endowed with Omnipotence: The Power of Your Thoughts Illuminated is scheduled for publication late fall 2012. My book tells you exactly how the power of thought works.

The power of thought works in direct correlation to your predominant thoughts and beliefs. For most of us, that means we get more of what is already in existence in our lives because the power of thought is the materialization of our strongest beliefs in physical reality. Nearly every thought we have today is a duplicate of the thought we had yesterday of the effect we get more of the same stuff. The time spent thinking about a potential new reality is extremely limited.

When you consider a new future, you do so by wishing away what currently is the reality you are experiencing or by daydreaming of what you really want. Wishing away what already is in existence (for example bills, a health problem, or excess weight) lends excessive thought power to what is. Whether you think negatively or positively about something, thinking about a particular something gives power to it. Think of a coin. Whether you think about the tail side or the head side, you are still thinking about the coin. The same is true of optimism and pessimism. Thinking positively optimistic about something, while nice, merely lends thought power to the brighter side of the experience. You then experience a great day, but nothing really changes. Consider a person with cancer. The person might be hopeful and positive about the outcome of their treatment, yet the focus remains on thoughts surrounding the belief, I have cancer, albeit they are hopeful of a positive outcome.

Typically, we do surround our beliefs with positive and negative thoughts which is why we experience runs of bad luck and a stroke of good fortune. However, positive thinking alone is not enough to uproot a current belief. Conversely, we should never engage in negative thinking.

Daydreaming about an ideal life does not work for two reasons. First, little thought is lent to the daydream compared to the redundancy of thoughts cycling through your mind. 95% of the thoughts you have today are exactly the same thoughts you had yesterday. You think of your life as it exists now, which only serves to reinforce what already is. A daydream does not have enough oomph power to eject you from your current experience. The second reason daydreams are ineffective is due to beliefs already in place. If you really believed you could be a rock star or find a cure for your cancer, you would have that experience because beliefs and reality are fused together.

Think about everything in your life now. Absolutely everything is a belief. You believe you have a yellow sofa, a wonderful spouse, are healthy or you believe you are overweight, unemployed or are in financial despair. Everything in your experience now is absolutely believable to you. Somewhere in your conscious mind, doubt is held when it comes to fulfilling your daydream. You doubt your ability, the likelihood of the outcome, and the immediacy in which the daydream can be fulfilled. Thus, the daydream is always held at bay.

The power of thought never makes mistakes. The power works every single time. When we misunderstand how the power of thought works, we mistake our failure to summon abundance and good fortune as a failure of this power. However, the power of thought works in conjunction with your strongest thoughts and beliefs. The power only appears to be misfiring because you are not bringing enough contrary thought power or the right kind of thought energy to the table. So essentially what is already built up by your thoughts and beliefs perpetuates effortlessly since not enough contrary thought power is being fired.

Consider a tree as a belief you want to rid yourself of. If you swing an ax at the tree, eventually that tree will topple and a treeless landscape will emerge. The same process is needed as you change your experiences in life. Metaphorically speaking, if you consider your beliefs as the tree and your ability to think differently as the ax, then as you sharpen your ax (clarify your thinking) and swing hard at the destructive belief, the belief will also fall and a fresh reality will appear.

Unfortunately, most of us approach the tree (belief) with a butter knife. And we hit that tree so irregular and with such little oomph power that the tree (belief) still stands nearly untouched. But, if we ramp up the force and duration of our thought power, meaning if we change our thoughts and think those thoughts often, we can shift our experiences almost immediately in direct correlation to the effort we put forth. In the process of doing so, we cannot tolerate negativity, doubt, fear, or skepticism, because these are the seeds of your old belief. If you let these destructive thoughts in, you will only plant more beliefs that will need to be chopped down.

The power of thought is not difficult to summon when you understand how it works. The right thoughts to think are always the thoughts that produce good feelings. What is the ideal version of you? Take aim with your thoughts. Think big! Think often!

# 48 STRETCH YOUR THOUGHTS

2011-12-22T04:12:00.000-08:00

When you feel you have good command at quieting your thoughts, you are ready to progress to the first step in thought direction: stretching your thoughts.

Remember the 60,000 thoughts a day you have? Motivational coaches hired by professional athletes or CEO’s of fortune 500 companies instruct their protégé’s to take one thought and hold it for as long as they possibly can. That is what I want you do. Take only one constructive thought and practice holding it. The only requirement is that it must be a neutral thought. Do not think of anything that you feel overly emotional about. Think of a shoelace, a leaf, or a fish.

Roll the thought over in your mind. What does your thought look like? Hold this picture for several minutes if you are able. Did you pick the shoelace? Is your shoelace long or short? New or old? Are the ends intact or frayed? Is the shoelace dirty? Set your alarm again and meditate with this same thought over the next several days. Do not alter the object from session to session. You want to become adept at holding very specific thoughts for periods of time. It is okay to view your shoelace or fish from different viewing angles. However, you want to pick only one item to contemplate. Stick with it for a few days before moving on. Then select another object to view in your mind such as the fish.

After finishing a few sessions contemplating just the shoelace (or fish or leaf), practice thinking of just the color green. Is your green winter green? Forest green? Light green? Lime green? See your green in a can of paint swirling as you stir it. Stretch your green so it is a large blob. Tighten it up to a super ball size and bounce it on the ground in your mind. Again, practice thinking about just the color green for several minutes.

As you become adept at holding your thoughts, bring a thought into your session that triggers emotion. Make it a happy emotion, never a negative emotion. Think about your child’s face, the trophy fish you reeled in, or your new car. Whatever your thought is it has to make you smile. Stretch your thought as long as you possibly can. Remember to smile while you meditate on the thought. After all, the requirement was to think of something that makes you smile.

After you have completed stretching your happy thought, select a thought that calls forth your senses. Rattle sensory thoughts around in your mind. Go through each of your five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. Your goal is to pick a thought from each of these categories and stretch it.

You can open your eyes for your sense of sight. Pick a boat in a magazine, your dream house, or a pan of brownies and examine the contents. Take in the scenery, the color, the texture, the shape and any other details visually that you perceive. Focus on your target for several minutes before moving on to another sense. Choose a musical instrument, a train whistle, or the wind for your sense of hearing. Close your eyes and listen to the sound within the confines of your mind. Hear its noise. Stretch this thought as long as possible. Move on to touch. Use the thought of your baby’s skin, the roughness of sandpaper, the smoothness of glass. Move on to taste. What does raw cinnamon taste like? What about the sweetness of sugar or the sourness of lemon? Draw these mental pictures. Consider what you smell. Think of a skunk’s odor, the funky animal smell at the zoo, your favorite perfume, or the smell of moth balls. Stretch each of these thoughts in your mind. Roll them over and see them. Hear them. Touch them. Taste them. Smell them all within your mind.

These exercises strengthen the conscious minds ability to visualize internally imprinting upon the Universal Mind. You are learning to clarify. When you construct your ideals, the pictures you need to submit must contain as much sensory data as possible. Thinking I want an orange. Seeing the perfectly rich orange color, feeling the waxy pitted peel, smelling the erupting juice squirt as you break it in two, and tasting the sweet flavor of the orange burst within the confines of your mouth is a more powerful image to imprint upon the Universal Mind that just thinking it would be nice to have an orange. It is with all of your sensory images that you paint the thoughts that produce the most effective outcomes.

I want you to practice thinking of in terms of mental sensory images. This is not something that should consume your thinking or something you should hang on every word. As opportunity presents itself throughout your day, take a moment or two to call forth very vivid mental pictures. If someone is telling a funny story, instead of purely listening externally to their yarn, play out its pictures in your mind as they tell it. Try to imagine the people they describe. Try seeing the situation. Hear the laughter erupt in your mind.

Go about your day looking for opportunities to imprint your senses mentally. If someone offers you a chocolate bar, take a moment to consider the smell and taste within your mind, not just what you see and smell physically. Practice, practice, practice thinking in terms of pictures. Draw forth as many of your senses as possible as you think. The value this will provide in just a short period of time will be immeasurable.

Nikola Tesla, a great inventor, always visualizes and manipulates within his mind first the perfect embodiment of his desire. “In this way,” he writes in the Electrical Experimenter, “I am enabled to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything. When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of, and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete (form), the product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived it should; in twenty years there has not been a single exception.”

Practice thought imagery and stretching well after your practice sessions have ended. You need to become effective at this. The only way to master thought direction is by practice. As you continue, the alarm devices will not be necessary. However, set them if you feel it helps by all means. The more frequent attempts you make at these mental practices sessions, the quicker you will get your mind in shape to perform the enticing task of securing your ideals. Practice, practice, practice! Your experiences will be delivered in exaction proportion to your efforts. What goes in must come out. No efforts in equal no change without

#47 Squeezing Out All Thoughts

2011-12-14T08:43:00.001-08:00

Once you are able to feel the presence of your thoughts, the next step is to squeeze them out. You will proceed as you did above setting an alarm device throughout the day followed up by periods of meditation. At each alarm interval and mediation session, try to blank out your thoughts. Think of nothing. At first this will require much effort. You will probably only be able to shut thoughts out for brief moments; several seconds to a few minutes. Continue this practice for several days until you feel comfortable blanking out your mind. Your goal is to squeeze out thoughts for at least one to several minutes at a time.

Practice squeezing thoughts out of your conscious mind for several weeks. Do this regardless of the thought, even if it is one that fulfills you. Gaining the ability to shut thoughts out, any thoughts, will help you eliminate destructive thoughts. As you develop the habit of going inside you, you will begin to notice both your feel good thoughts and your feel bad thoughts. As you detect a destructive thought, your practiced ability will allow you to squeeze it out. You must practice, however. If you do not master squeezing thoughts out when destructive thoughts are noticed, it will be very difficult to get your mind off the thoughts. The Law of Attraction will pepper you with them. Subsequently, you must be versed at shutting thoughts out.

These exercises: Familiarizing yourself with your thoughts and shutting your thoughts out, assist in directing your thoughts. You will not be able to direct your thoughts until you have mastered the connection within yourself and have developed the ability to squeeze out thoughts. After all, you cannot direct that which you have no control over. The control must be gained first.

Directing your thoughts is done in steps. Practice is required, much like teaching a child to tie shoes or ride a bike. It is through instruction and practice that we learn. If we do not practice we do not fully reap the benefits. How many people do you know that simply cannot swim? It is not because they are inept. It is because they failed to practice. Anyone can swim if they practice. Consequently, anyone can learn to direct their thoughts through practice.

This is mental work but requires the same regimented rehearsal as any physical activity you would prepare for. You practice until you learn and you will learn every time. Every child learns to walk, tie shoes, ride a bike, and read. Children are sponges of opportunity because we discipline them to practice until the task is accomplished. We do not dare take the shoes away after a few unsuccessful tying attempts, nor do we stroller children for life who do not walk by the age of one. We tell our children to keep trying until you learn. That is why we all know how to ride a bike, tie our shoes and walk. It is with this diligence that you learn to direct your thoughts.

It is important that you ease yourself into thought direction. You would not teach a child to ride a bike by perching them on a motorcycle. You would not select an expert course to start skiing. Do not be tempted to go immediately to hard in thought direction. Remember, you validate your experiences as proof of truth. Any failures will be deemed by you as proof of some inability or proof that your thoughts are powerless. So it is very important that small steps are taken and small successes are celebrated, thereby validating your work as accurate. Small drips applied gradually increase your water bill tremendously. It is the same with your thoughts. Start small, build tall.

#46 Exploring the Conscious Mind

2011-12-07T06:02:00.000-08:00

By now, your attention should be shifted inward as you notice what you are thinking. You are developing an awareness of at least some of your daily thought habits. You are also meditating on a regular basis (several times week). Up to this point, you have made no effort to change your habits or prevent your thoughts. You have let them roll through your mind unhampered.

I am going to give you an exercise designed to remind you to inspect inwardly. Set your wrist watch or cell phone alarm to ring several times a day (resetting each time it goes off for an hour later). When your reminder alarm sounds, stop! Jot down exactly what thoughts are present when the alarm sounded. Make no attempt to embellish the thought or think of something if you cannot recall. If you do not know or cannot remember your thought, write down I drew a blank. You will be surprised how quickly the thought leaps from your clutch. Set your alarm for the next half hour or hour and do the same. Keep this log for several days. Your goal is to awaken to your thoughts. As you progress, you will naturally begin inspecting your thoughts several times a day without the aid of the alarm. The alarm helps you develop the habit of peeking inside your mind.

As you journal your thought log, set aside at least ten minutes to half an hour a day to meditate. Meditation shuts out the physical world forcing your focus inward. Meditating is not difficult. In fact it is relatively easy and should leave you feeling refreshed. Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed. Quiet dimly lit rooms work nice. Sit on a comfortable chair; lay on the floor, or on your bed. This is mental work and dozing off is not allowed. Save meditating for a time when you are alert, yet able to relax.

Find your comfortable spot. Close your eyes and let your thoughts flow freely. Permit them to trail. Pay attention to the speed at which thoughts “pop” in for a visit. They come. They go. Often thoughts are followed by similar thoughts and clear images. Other times their randomness distracts from the picture. Your goal is to familiarize yourself with you. The only way to know you is to go inside you and feel your presence through your thoughts. Mediate in this fashion for several days, again making no effort to control your thoughts. Your goal at this point is self awareness. Repeat this process of dropping in on your thoughts for several days until you feel connected to the inner you.

You are not ready to move forward until the connection is felt. You are a ships captain right now getting familiar with the crew and equipment. You would make no attempt to sail your vessel without proper acclimation.

It is OK to feel overwhelmed by your thoughts; most people do, which is why they tuck them nicely away inside their head and spend time dazzling themselves with their physical acquisitions. You will never try to control your thoughts sporadic nature. You will only direct your thoughts towards your ideals as you currently define them. Directing your thoughts requires that you (1) disarm destructive thoughts and (2) install constructive thoughts. The rest of your imaginative, spontaneous, unprompted, unstructured thoughts should be left to prowl.

#46 Building a New Foundation

2011-12-05T09:05:00.000-08:00

You now have an understanding of the power that resides inside you. You know you have an insatiable creative purpose that is unleashed through thought. Thoughts attract like energies binding into beliefs. From your thoughts and beliefs springs your reality. You have learned that your beliefs repel thoughts that are not on the same frequency denying access to the universal mind. Therefore, you cannot create that which betrays your beliefs. You cannot even fake it.

Emotions and Feelings allow you to gauge the relationship between your physical world and your thoughts simply by asking yourself: How do I feel? Am I joyful? Grateful? Appreciative? Or am I mad, sad and frustrated? Thoughts lay the groundwork for feelings. You feel what you think. Feelings provide a temperature check for what you are thinking right now. Feelings steer you towards your ideals if you tune into them. Your goal is to follow the thoughts that leave you feeling good and abandon the thoughts that leave you feeling bad. Remember, thoughts that leave you feeling bad are bad leaders. You do not want to be lead where they are taking you. It is that simple.

Ideals give you direction. They are powerful blueprints. After all, what would power be without a purpose? Your purpose is to create the unrestricted vision you hold of yourself in a harmonious state with the Universal Mind. You will feel fulfilled as you move towards your Ideal. Your Ideal will always be a moving target. As you accomplish, so you will endeavor to create more. Once you understand how you work, all that is necessary is to define what your vision of you is.

Clarity is the painted pictures of your ideals. It is absolutely necessary that you give brush strokes to these pictures. Clarity combines thoughts and ideals in the same coordinate points within your mind. The more often you can combine thoughts, beliefs, ideals, and expectancies the quicker your new experience emerges.

Expectations serve as check points in your thinking. By asking yourself, what do I expect to occur this week, you can gage where your thinking has been. If your ideals are not on that list, then your thinking is not where it needs to be.

Your imagination exercises your spontaneous thinking. You do not need to get an imagination. You already have one; a really great one! Sometimes people will use phrases like, you have no imagination. It is only through lack of use that we fail to rely on our imaginative ability. Using it is like toning the muscles that lay ready for use under your skin. Once employed, you will not be able to stop the popping of ideas.

Finally, you have your misunderstood willpower which is your magnetic energy in motion. It is the Law of Attraction at work. Smokers, dieters, and alcoholics are all too familiar with this pull of energy. It is the ever so powerful cyclical thoughts connecting mental to physical. The power of your will to draw cannot be avoided.

Once you understand each of the working pieces that make up you, it becomes uncomplicated to navigate you. Easier, make note, not easy. However, understanding helps! Before you were afraid to imagine, now you have permission. Previously you settled, now you idealize. Yesterday you allowed your thoughts to run amok amidst fret, anger and frustration. Today, you command them towards abundance joy and harmony. Where once doubt settled in confidence is restored. You are in charge of you and always have been. Creating your ideal vision of you begins right now with thought acquaintance.

I had the opportunity to visit an annual art show in Grand Rapids, Michigan called Art Prize. Artists around the world compete for the annual art prize of $1,000. It was hard to find a piece of art at Art Prize that was not amazing in its creation.

However, there was a piece that stood out in particular. An artist by the name of Paul A. Baliker had carved a piece of driftwood into a large circle about fifteen feet in diameter. The carving contained all sorts of intricate detail such as a carved giraffe, monkeys, and so forth. He work was called A Matter of Time. This particular artist was on hand to answer questions about his piece.

One of the members of the group admiring the work asked the artist as he stood off to the side, “How do you even begin to build something like this? It seems so overwhelming to me.” The artist responded, “I start from the bottom. I always start from the bottom and I just keep working upwards.”

#45 EXERCISING YOUR IMAGINIATION

2011-12-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

If you are unsure how to bring your imagination from passive to active, watch a child play. Children have no trouble at all employing their active imagination. Give them a ball of yarn and a pile of sticks and they will give you a fort. “Here’s where the kitchen is,” they will say! “Yeah, and over here is my room. My bed is here. And this big rock is my pillow.” Children will spend hours setting up battlegrounds, tea parties, or hoeing a make believe garden. How are they at entrepreneur skills? There is no reluctance on their part selling crayon pictures, homemade bracelets or cookies that are falling apart. Do kids dread going door to door to selling their goods? No, they love going door to door with their cooked up inventions, crayon pictures and mud pies! Kids believe in their abilities and actively employ their imagination.

The world’s most successful people transport their imagination from passive to active: Movie makers, song writers, novelist, gaming creators, painters, inventors, scientist, entertainers, and magicians. The top performers in any professional category are always those deemed to have the “wildest” imaginations. You too, can be imaginative. All it takes is practice. What is available to any top performer is also available to you. As you use your imagination, a dousing of fresh thought trickles in.

Shedding limiting beliefs allows your imagination to stretch. When we shed the belief that man could not fly, we came up will all sorts of vehicles for man to fly in: airplanes, hot air balloons, helicopter, space shuttle, parachute, and blimps. It is the belief that bars the ideas entry. When you clear the path, ideas will spring to mind, one after another, from the easily doable to the absurd. Do not deny these thoughts their proper consideration. That is your mental power in action trying to bring your desired object close to you. Denying these thoughts and opportunities is the same as denying your object.

Are you familiar with the children’s movies “Finding Nemo” or “Monster, Inc?” Finding Nemo is about a young fish that is separated from his overprotective and rather paranoid father. The father must venture out of the safety zone of his coral reef to find his young son. The story tells the tale of father and sons adventure as they try to find each other. Monster’s Inc. is a story about Monsters that live in a parallel universe to ours accessible through the closets of children. The Monsters have to scare children to collect screams. The screams of children power the Monsters electrical world. A little girl accidentally enters the monster’s world and the adventure begins.

These stories could only be created through active imagination employed regularly. When you are open to ideas, they come. When you shut ideas out through your beliefs, they cannot come. They are denied access by the beliefs. The only reason you feel a lack of creativity is because you are not letting your thoughts springboard you into ideas like Finding Nemo or Monsters Inc. You do not permit them. You walk around oblivious to your thoughts with a big tag across your chest that reads, “Access denied.”

Your thoughts are worthy of exploration. If there is ever a time to listen to the knock, knock, knock of your thoughts…the time is now. Often our brief interludes of constructive thought are followed up with the flickering of attracted thoughts responding. But we miss the sparking of new thought. We take no action.

Your imagination is tapped through active use. Take your imagination into your meditation sessions. Force its use by asking yourself questions out of the ordinary. Ask yourself questions you would not normally or ever consider. Examples such as: What would my world be like if I lived on the leaf of a Sugar Maple Tree? Would I learn how to access its sap? What could I use the sap for besides a sweetener? Ask of yourself, how could I have $10 without laboring for it? What job do I think is the best job in the world? In considering this job, what do I think is the most challenging aspect of this “best job?”

There are no rules to the questions you ask except that you must either feel good or neutral about the material. Bring no unpleasantries into your session. Your imagination will spring up through active frequent use. If you do not use it, you lose it. However, you can gain it back. Your imagination does not pack up and leave you. You have only suppressed it. It did not go anywhere. By suppressing it, imaginative thoughts do not occur to you. When you use it often, thoughts leap seemingly out of nowhere.

When you feel in command of your imagination, then you can initiate thoughts of your ideals. Prematurely setting ideals causes you to aim low. After all, if your imagination is harnessed like a beast, it will not occur to you that certain ideals are available. You have likely heard people say, “I never would have thought of that” or “I wish I would have thought of that.” What are they saying this about? Just about every good idea that slaps them in the face from the Pet Rock to the Invisible leashed pet. They said it about Colonel Sanders secret recipe, Martha Stewart’s Life Style entertainment, the slinky, Rubik’s cube, and on and on.

Ideals spring from the pursuit of an active imagination. When you allow yourself to ponder without restriction the ideal life you desire, it too will begin to take shape. Ideas that would have never occurred to you before will occur. That is why it is important not to loiter in new found thought. You should always keep idealizing since your ideal is always relative to where you are now. It is a moving target. As you carve your way towards your ideal, thoughts that have not occurred to you before will help you to set new ideals. You are always moving towards a new set of ideals. If you linger to long on a tier, beliefs will grip you in that tier. While some may be beneficial, others will hold you to certain experiences. That is why it is always important to remember what you believe holds no universal truth. You do not want new beliefs to mesmerize you in the same regard your old ones do.

Your imaginative ideas should be as unrealistic as possible for this reason: What is real, is already believable by you and requires no reinforcement. Thinking in terms of what is unrealistic and unobtainable stretches your mind. It forces you to consider thoughts you normally would not. Once these thoughts are brought into the active mind for inspection other like thoughts will follow including thoughts that make the unobtainable obtainable and the unrealistic real.

When Gary Dahl first thought of the Pet Rock, it was amongst friends who were at the time complaining about their pets. The Pet Rock was a laughable substitute for a pet. However, Dahl went home to consider the Pet Rock further. He even went as far as creating a guide on caring for the fictitious Pet Rock. The more he thought about this very unrealistic pet, the more real it became real. Ultimately, he put together a marketing plan that successfully launched his pet rock to a welcoming market. The rest is history.

Your imagination works well when you use it well! Creating your ideals through imagination serves as a guide for your thoughts. Until now, you have allowed your thoughts to wander, snaking off when you perceive them as becoming too unrealistic within your belief system. Time spent in concentrated effort imagining your ideals draws forth those experiences. Like the water drip and the fall leaves, small daily doses build up monumental results quickly. The degree to which you are willing to devote concentrating on your ideals, determines the speed at which your ideals are returned. Small doses performed daily lead to large immediate results.

#44 Imagination and Will Power

2011-11-29T04:16:00.000-08:00

Your will power, thoughts and imagination are bound together. Will power NEVER goes against them. Therefore, it behooves you to try to abandon through willpower the thoughts you have imagined. You cannot do it.

You are always in a state of attracting. What you attract depends upon what you think about and believe. Your will power is your power of attracting as you will something to happen. Your will is your thoughts materializing.

Understand that you cannot use your willpower as a weapon against your thoughts and imagination. Your will draws reality towards you like an earth magnet. It is unwavering, unbendable and unstoppable until you change your thoughts.

Diets fail, addiction treatment plans fail, marriages fail when you consume yourself with thoughts of donuts, drugs, or adulterous desires and then try to waive off the materialization of those events with some incredible will power. Your will power is not some super hero inner strength that allows you to thwart off a donut, a drink or an affair. It is exactly the opposite! Your will power is your power to draw to you what you think about. The only way to prevent the materializations of events is by stopping your thoughts.

Thoughts attract similar thoughts; similar thoughts band together as ideas. Mental pictures are painted. Soon you are visualizing. It is the obsessive repetition of thought that draws forth unwanted behavior. You have to be immediately willing to banish thoughts unworthy of you from the focus of your attention. Your bad habits are conquerable when your thinking is consciously directed away from the habitually bad thoughts. That is the only way. Soon your physical world will turn about and seem to cure you. But it is the steered thinking that altered your experience.

Think of your will as self talk. The repeated messages that you send yourself direct your experience. For example, if self-talk includes commenting on the undesirable status of your weight, obsessing over what afflicts you, or a dread of exercising each of these conditions will magnetically be drawn to you. As you fight for control, you further draw undesirable situations because you are magnifying your thoughts in these areas. Your power resides in redirecting your thoughts not in trying to redirect the environment the thoughts produced.

What many of us attempt to do is diet by forgoing food or battling intense exercise regimes. While physical exercise has its benefits and place, you are fat because of your thoughts. You are consumed by thoughts of food and weight. You try to diet by forcing food away. However, you continue thinking about brownies, treats and the taste of bacon. Repeatedly trying to shove the food away does not work. Your thoughts, imagination and WILL POWER are strong attractants. They will produce results whether you like it or not. Directing your thoughts away from food and the scales will change your weight. That is your only option.

What do we say about a person who is on a diet and forgoes desert? “Oh my, what astonishing will power!” However, it is not the will power that banished the dessert. The thoughts of the dessert were not allowed to spin out of control. The person’s thoughts were on anything BUT the dessert. You cannot think of dessert or its delicious offering and push it aside. Your thoughts are what are pushed aside first! You reject the dessert by rejecting first the thoughts.

You might think that you have been thinking fat thoughts and so agree to think thin thoughts. However, you “imagine snacks.” You think you are powerless to your own will. However as I have stated, your will power followed your imagination. One million Americans are overweight. Five million diet each year in futile attempts to shed pounds that only regain themselves over time. Failed attempt after failed attempt leaves you feeling in the dumps. All you think about is dieting plagued by these incredible urges to eat. If you had listened to your feelings (feeling bad about your weight and failures) you would have known they were trying to tell you something about your thoughts. You are attracting more reasons to feel bad, more weight, more down in the dump feelings. Your attempts to thwart a reality that you created through thought are impossible. You have to change your thinking. When you think of yourself at your ideal weight, feel good about the person you are right now and push aside the thoughts of weight, you will experience change. You have to love yourself the way you are, adore your body and feel good about the person you see in the mirror in order to be given more experiences of feeling good about who you are. That is will power in action! It is the attracting will power of specific constructive thoughts, I love who I am and the rejection of “I am fat” thought in action here.

Remember we talked about the power the word I am contains. Whatever follows I am are your beliefs. Your beliefs dish out your reality. So what you believe about I am (fill in the blank) is what you are going to get without fail every single time.

Every person that is overweight is consumed by thoughts of food, right size portions, hunger, special diets, new diets, tight clothes, calories, carbs, protein, foregoing dessert, cellulite, dress size, and how nice fries would taste right now. Overweight people are consumed with thoughts of food and their body size. Right weight people give no more thought to food than they do a blade a grass. In fact, food is so far from their thoughts they often forget it is time to eat. Their thoughts are not consumed with hunger or their clothing size. Right weight people look in the mirror and think I like how I look today.

Change your thinking. Change your life. Do not underestimate the power of your will. Do not think for one moment that you can entertainment negative thoughts and reject their consequences. The key is to lock the door on thoughts that destruct you. You must with all effort imposed push them from you mind.

People who lose weight, have a drinking problem, or drug addiction have incredible difficulty overcoming their obstacles due to will power. They put their problems constantly in the forefront of their thoughts and then try to reject the outcomes. They are met with debacle every time. You cannot reject physically what you have produced mentally. You cannot WILL away the physical aspects of what your thoughts have produced. Your will power follows your thoughts and imagination WITHOUT FAIL. You cannot use your will power as a weapon against thoughts and imagination. It is their ally. We refer to our will power backwards so often. We have deceived ourselves (built up this false belief) into thinking we have super strength to will away what we think about. However, you get what you think about every single time.

Often times we find some people get sick, get better, and get sick again. Or they lose weight and then gain it right back. Ultimately, the bad thoughts return surging them once again with a notion of weakness. Why does this happen if thoughts are attracting powerful thoughts and positive beliefs are growing? How does the bad habit return? By the time you have lost the weight or have been won over to good health, shouldn’t you continue going in that direction?

Two aspects of the power of thought occur when we yo-yo up and down in pants size or yo-yo up and down spectrum of health. First, polarized thinking is ravaging the thought process. Second, normal neutral keeps you grounded. You can pivot in any direction away from normal neutral. However, until you change your normal neutral pivoting point your polarized thoughts will return you to that normal neutral point of inspection. People plagued with weight problems or illnesses never really change their thinking patterns. For instance, they may constantly watch food in-take as they slim down. They obsess over their weight. They worry about gaining weight back. If a person is ill, that person may worry about getting sick again. The habitual thoughts never leave their mind. They are still focused on the destructive thoughts. However, they have temporarily moved to the positive aspects of the destructive thoughts. For example, you can think about how good you feel about your body size or how bad you feel about your body size; but you are still noticing your body size.

You take any bad habit and you will find that it is a bad habit of the mind. Your thoughts are where the offenders lay. When you try to make physical corrections, you lose every time. You have to rid yourself of the offending thoughts first. If you attack the outward physical condition but do nothing to correct destructive thoughts, your destructive thoughts will return your destructive physical condition.

Smalls seeds of beliefs build allowing you temporary positive successes. However, in the trenches lay the negative habitual thoughts that are very comfortable to you. Eventually you allow them to creep back in without even an awareness that they are doing so. Your bad habit thoughts whisper, “We’ve been good. One piece of pie won’t hurt.” Remember your thoughts have attracting power. As soon as you allow a destructive thought in, others will follow. Soon you have eaten three desserts; gained fifteen pounds back and feel bad about yourself! The only way to rid the difficulty in your life is to rid all thoughts, positively constructed or negatively constructed, that center round the problem.

Remember feelings are navigators that indicate whether you are moving towards harmony, away from harmony or are at normal neutral. If you do not feel really good about yourself or condition then you must take action to acquire that feeling.

Whatever your perceived problem is, as it enters your mind, state your ideal you, and then dismiss that thought. Excuse it. Tell it you no longer need it. Any thought about your weight (or problem) brings upon more reasons to obsess over. Remember, your will power is not a weapon to be used against your vice.

Smokers encounter this same sort of failure when they attempt to quit smoking. They throw the pack of cigarettes out and try to fight the urge not to smoke. What is the“urge?” That urge is your will power in action bending you; physically pulling you as hard as it can towards materialization of your thoughts. It is not the nicotine that draws the cigarette to you. It is the thoughts of smoking spiraling out of control in your mind. The urge to smoke is your thoughts; your will power drawing to you exactly what you are thinking about. How do people quit smoking? They quit by forcing thoughts of smoking from the mind.

Just think for one moment of that inescapable power as you succumb to any bad habit! That is the law of attraction at its finest. Do you recognize it? We erroneously call the Law of Attraction an urge. An urge is repeated cyclical thoughts over and over “I want a cigarette, I want a brownie,” “I want a beer,” set to replay that thrusts you with the force of gale winds towards the object that you choose to think about. The Law of Attraction is connecting you without fail to your object.

You can chock it up to some chemical imbalance or powerful withdrawal effects of drugs. Call it what you like. But know this. The second you redirect your thoughts, the sensation disappears. Consider driving home from work with obsessive thoughts of I want a cigarette traversing your mind. Someone calls your cell phone. Your thoughts of wanting a cigarette are interrupted as you focus in on the conversation with the caller. The moment you hang up you allow the flood gates of destructive thought to usher in. The urge to smoke that cigarette comes right back. Your constant cyclical thinking propels you towards the object of your thoughts. As long as you think that drug has the ability to start and stop your thoughts, you will misplace your ability to quit. Your ability to quit resides with your ability to redirect your thoughts. Your ability to lose weight resides with your ability to redirect your thoughts. As I said before, any bad habit is a bad habit of the mind first!

You can blame the drug’s effects or a chemical imbalance. You can blame your thyroid or your genes. Blame whatever you want. Understand though that by placing blame you misplace the solution. With any bad habit you have falsified the joy the habit brings. You have developed a false belief. You erroneously believe your bad habit brings you joy. You think pleasurably of smoking or eating. Some motivational authors will tell you that if you associate enough discomfort with bad habits, they will dissipate. To some degree that is true because we generally avoid painful thoughts. Additionally, painful thoughts are often the catalyst necessary to redirect thoughts. We generally do not like thinking about painful thoughts so we listen to our feelings by redirecting our thoughts.

Ultimately, though it does not matter whether you focus on reasons for wanting something or not wanting something. It is that microscopic attention that you are giving the habit that causes the problem to linger in your life. Pain begins in your thoughts. As you associate pain in your thoughts, you tend to stop thinking about painful thoughts. For example, people do not like to think about past relationships gone sour, getting fired or in general any bad experiences endured. It is because these experiences cause the feeling of pain that people steer from them. The feeling is meant to direct you away from the painful thought. Often we listen to these types of feelings and do redirect our thoughts.

However, experiences always start and stop with your thoughts. It is better to thrust out all thought of the bad habit. Any attention given to your habit is thought power. Remember it is not what you do not want that you do not get. It is what you avoid thinking about that you do not get.

Imagine harnessing the urge of your will power in action. We have all felt that will power before; whether it was for a cigarette, a drink or even for the affections of another person. Imagine harnessing that power in any direction you wanted; that unbendable, undeniable, unyielding power to serve your thoughts. Imagine unleashing that power towards your ideals! It is that power directed and concentrated, like you employ now on all your bad habits, directed towards your ideals. Guess what is going to come your way? It cannot be stopped. Your power to attract is unyielding.

Our old thoughts continue because like a well worn shoe they fit comfortably. There is no place like home. You will keep replaying these thoughts until you break free from the pattern. We can redirect our thoughts at any time with concentrated effort. Some people equate effort with massive amounts of work. Effort is energy. Directed energy is power. You do not have to sit in a darkened room sweat brimming from your brow forcing unwanted thoughts from your mind. You just need to be aware that they exist and expel them the second they arise. Replace your harmful thought with a new helpful thought. Soon your new thoughts will feel like that old comfortable shoe.

As I was going through a divorce with my husband, I often had thoughts pop into my mind that made me feel angry towards him. My feelings were an indication that I needed to change my thoughts ‘or else’ more reasons for being angry would be brought upon me. However, I did not always listen to them. Sometimes I let the thoughts brew allowing my angry thoughts to attract more angry thoughts. As I did this without fail greater and greater reasons were brought into my awareness of why I should be angry with him.

This is how both the Law of Attraction and your point of normal neutral work. The Law of Attractions gives you more of the same thoughts to think about. Your normal neutral position keeps you tethered to your current state of affairs.

All of the thoughts, emotions, attitudes and beliefs occur in the mind. My anger was a product of my thoughts. My thoughts were not a product of my anger because I did not feel angry until that first thought occurred. As I let it grow, the feeling grew. Again, my feelings were trying to tell me that I was not in succinct with harmony.

On the occasions that I allowed my thoughts the freedom to explore those angry thoughts, without fail days or sometimes a week later something would happen that would provoke more anger. It may have been something related to my husband that refueled those thoughts or something entirely different such as finding something a trinket of mine that my kids broke.

The point is that by allowing those thoughts to brew, I was attracting more reasons to be angry into my experience. I was manifesting it. This is exactly what I mean when I tell you that you form your reality as you. Most of us do it on the fly. It then does not occur to us that our thoughts create it. We think we are thinking those thoughts due to the circumstance. We do not recall our angry thoughts of yesterday that have brought us incidents to be angry over today. We do not make that connection.

It is difficult to thrust out thoughts that are part of beliefs. They do attract. They will attract. They will be brought to your awareness constantly. Ridding me of my angry thoughts was not easy either. I kept reminding myself that unless I wanted more of these same thoughts and physical experiences, then I needed to stop my thoughts. I battled with pushing them out of my mind too. I found it easier when I changed my focus; that is I thought about something entirely different, something that made me feel good…my ideals.

Your will power is unleashed upon your ideals only by developing thoughts and beliefs that give you that elated feeling. How do you get that elated feeling? You take action on them. It is no different than any habit you have formed. To this point, your ideals have not given you that elated pleasurable feeling because you have taken no action upon them. As you act, your feel good feelings will surface. Soon taking action upon your ideals will become an insatiable urge.

Think how good you feel when you act upon something constructive. You get a project done that has been on your to do list. You take that vacation you have dreamed about. You go to your child’s school function. You take a day off and go to the spa.

Actions fuels thoughts. Thoughts return more of the same. As these “feel good” thoughts occupy your mind, the destructive ones are automatically set aside. You now have good thoughts being produced. If you find yourself stuck in a cyclical thought pattern, take action! Do something that you feel good about.

This is how I broke the pattern of returning to myself angry thoughts. I worked on my book. I organized my closets (something I felt good about doing). I engaged in playful activity with my kids. As I involved myself in physical action, my mental thoughts had to tend to those physical activities and feel good thoughts. Thoughts precede form. So, if I am doing something, I have to think about it first. That left my angry thoughts untended to. My angry thoughts could not occupy my mind and so they left.

To some degree action taken can give relief to your cyclical thoughts, whether your cyclical thoughts are of anger, smoking, weight issues, or problems with your health. Ultimately, you need to deal with your underlying beliefs in order to pivot away from the problem altogether. We will talk about how to do that in a later blog.

#43 IMAGINATIVE REDUNDANCY

2011-11-27T11:26:00.000-08:00

We readily consider ourselves creatures of habit. We sit at the same desk or lunch table. We follow the same morning routine. We follow the same bedtime ritual. However, we do not stop to consider our habitual mental thoughts. We apply our habits solely to the physical aspects of our lives and are oblivious to our repeated daily mental thoughts. It is the repeated mental thoughts that produce our daily physical habits, but we are unaware.

It is the patterned thinking that we need to break away from for the real change to occur. Our imaginations have been stymied as a result. Remember those 60,000 thoughts a day we had? Recall, 95% of what we think are yesterday’s thoughts? Your imagination produced those redundant thoughts. You struggle with fresh new ideas, concepts, inventions, or change because you are imagining the same things over and over.

These cyclical thought patterns grip us. For many of us, the last time we allowed our minds to have a truly fresh thought was during childhood. At some point during adolescent, our creativity was discouraged. We adopted the belief that imaginative thought belonged in the world of a child. Certainly our employers want imaginative employees. However, only along the lines of what they want you to create for them. While you might consider yourself a thinker, at work for example, you lack imagination in other areas where focus is lacking.

Without an exercised imagination, our thoughts stagnate into cyclical patterns. We are all capable of achieving much more than we currently do. It is only because we feel powerless and lacking that we pursue so little. When we connect to the real power source of our imagination, the lack and the feelings of powerlessness will subside.

You need to learn to use your minds potential by allowing your thoughts to trail pausing to concentrate not on your usual thoughts but thoughts that are atypical to you. Atypical does not mean undisciplined. Atypical means pushing your thoughts in directions you are not accustomed to.

Until diligence is employed your current thoughts will plague you. Change requires effort. As a child, you employed great effort learning to stand up and walk, hold your spoon to feed yourself, and tie your shoes. You concentrated heavily on these tasks until they were achieved. As an adult, you abandoned your diligent thinking in favor of more structured thoughts requiring much less mental effort. You checked your imaginative thinking in at the door of adulthood.

You did this at the same time that your limiting beliefs structured walls around you. As you were told to stop dreaming, or you’ll never be able to do that, or so few people ever become one of those, or why would you bother with such silly ideas you stopped building your aspirations within your mind. Beliefs formed that confined your thoughts to those that you think are appropriate within the belief.

You free your imagination by entertaining a multitude of thoughts just as you would exercise your leg through physical therapy after an injury. Allow time daily to explore fresh thoughts. Pick a quiet spot and a random topic and allow your thoughts to trail off. Do not allow your beliefs to give value to your thoughts.

Exercising your imagination will bring forth a heightened awareness of it. Frequent use will reward you with markedly fresh ideas. When you are presented with challenges, frequenting the realm of your imagination will help you solve your dilemmas. The key is the ability to summon up an endless supply of thoughts.

Supplement: The Cure for All Illness

2011-11-21T11:26:00.000-08:00

The cure for all illness lies with the belief in wellness firmly established within the conscious mind. I realize the audacity of this statement. I realize there are people who very much want to believe that statement; yet cannot seem to heal their body. Equally there are people who will say that it is irresponsible and contemptible to make such claims. However, I assure you the conscious mind creates your physical reality including your body and the perception of the body’s well being.

When you think of your whole body, you understand that there are parts within parts. Your skin is peeled back to reveal organs and tissue. Upon magnification of your organs and tissues, cells are revealed. These cells are reduced to molecules which then consist of atoms. Atoms contain protons and electrons. You ultimately are reduced to energy.

It is at this level of pure energy that your conscious mind excites energy and assembles you. You are assembled energy bond by the conscious mind. The energy created by a thought excites other forms of energy creating a process of attraction or creating a repellant. Your predominant thoughts and beliefs are your strongest attractors. They form the perception of you. If this is difficult to understand, I suggest that you read blogs #4, #5, and #6 for an in depth understanding of the human body and the conscious mind.

It is the conscious mind that controls the body. The body does nothing without the command of the conscious mind. You must think before you do. Even during periods of inattentiveness to the body, such as daydreaming while driving, the conscious mind still holds the body at its command. You are aware of your body even though you are thinking of other matters. Conversely, the body does not have periods of time where its whereabouts vanish from the conscious mind. The conscious mind can always locate the body.

Accordingly, the conscious mind is free to roam and has no need for a body. You already have periods of inattentiveness to the body such as when you are asleep. The conscious mind is free to explore this alternate reality of which the physical body is not a part. The body is never a part of a reality of which the conscious mind is not a part of. The body does not imprison the conscious mind, but rather the conscious mind commands the body.

When you think of your whole self again, you understand that the mind controls the body. Yet, we seem unwilling to relinquish this (conscious mind) control at a cellular level, erroneously believing that due to the small size of our body’s cells that they are not organized, controlled or directed by the conscious mind in the same manner as the body as a whole is. For example, we know our conscious mind is responsible for the movement of our hand, yet lose site that the conscious mind directs cellular activity as well. When we view the body as a whole entity, it seems unalterable to us. We have the perception that we are stuck with this body. But the body is combined at a level of pure energy that is very much directed by the predominant thoughts and beliefs of the conscious mind.

You cannot separate your body from the predominant thoughts and beliefs of the conscious mind. Your body is assembled energy based upon those thoughts and beliefs and so is one with them. You can change the perception of your body only through your beliefs. You have altered your body many times already and this does not seem weird to you. In fact, every cell in our body is replaced every eleven months or so. We shed our hair and our skin. Our eyelashes fall out. Our cells die and form new cells. We completely accept this. As the energy of our thoughts and beliefs change over time, so does our body. What we do not realize is that our perception of our body changes as our thoughts and beliefs change. So to that extent, we are already molding our body.

It is worth reading blogs #9 through #24 for an in depth understanding or your thoughts and beliefs. You cannot think yourself into a new body that of which is not a part of your belief system since your beliefs (predominant thoughts) are what create your body. For example, you cannot think your 5’2” frame into a 6’3” giant because you hold the belief that this is impossible. However, you can change many other aspects about your body which are believable to you, including healing yourself if you believe that is an outcome for you. If you believe in illness and the perception of power illness has upon you, then you cannot pretend your way to wellness. People who have sent illness into remission did so by believing in wellness. They reinforced their expectation of the outcome of wellness through action.

Positive thinking and optimism are the opposite side of the same belief: I am sick. Thinking optimistically about your illness is vastly different than believing you are already well. Do you understand the difference? You must think you are well in order to be well. To think you are sick and hope to get better reflects only illness.

Healing yourself is initiated within the mind first and is projected outwardly to the body. Doubt cannot be a part of your wellness belief system. Doubt, conflict, reservation, and fear are the epicenter of your current belief system thrusting off your new thoughts on wellness I must refer you to blog #24 What is Doubt and what it is not to help you understand its role. When you understand that the mind controls the body and not the other way around, you can begin the healing process.

The medical community often dismisses the ability of the conscious mind to heal the body. Often cases in which individuals overcome illness are thought to be rare or unusual. The reason there are so few cases of success is because the workings of the conscious mind are grossly misunderstood. The focus of the medical community is exclusively on the body. Yet, the body is the effect. The cause is always your thoughts.

There is a great deal of research demonstrating the benefits of positive thinking, optimism and hope. It is commonly accepted that these qualities initiate far better outcomes in terms of recovery than their counterparts of despair, pessimism and doubt. However, as I stated just a moment ago a positive attitude still supports a faulty belief system, albeit the brighter side of it.

Generally, people who face catastrophic illness teeter between pessimism and optimism. Those who remain on the optimistic side experience far greater positive outcomes than those who wallow in despair. Thus although it is misunderstood, the medical community gives credence to the power of positive thinking. They say: Be hopeful! Be optimistic! Ultimately though, the state of the conscious mind in the case of optimism or pessimism reflects and supports the same belief: I am sick, I believe in illness, I believe that the body is separated from the conscious mind and can act on its own accord, I believe in disease. If you want to be well, you must first endorse that wellness in the conscious mind. In other words, to “become,” you must already “be.” You are what you believe yourself to be. If you want to be well, you must believe in the ideal version of that wellness.

The reason healing your self is considered rare or difficult is because most people are unaware of their beliefs and how those beliefs actually perpetuate their illness. It is simply not enough to believe in a positive outcome. You must believe in what is ideal. Again, this is vastly different than remaining positive. Remember, the body does not and cannot act out on its own accord. Your body, all of your body including the small cells, relies upon direction from the conscious mind; so if your cells are not well or your heart is not well or you are overweight, your conscious mind is channeling that to you. Your body cannot produce outcomes that are not first initiated within the mind. The medical community grossly underestimates the power of the mind and places the body at the forefront for treatment; but you know your body is not in command and cannot cure that which your conscious mind produces. Your body is not in charge. Your conscious mind is. And for that reason, you must focus on what is ideal in order to achieve it.

You may have heard of a man by the name of Norman Cousins who in 1964, laughed his way back to health after he was diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis, a rare disease of the connective tissues. His chance of survival was stated as 1 in 500. “Get your affairs in order,” his doctor told him. Norman had mere months to live.
Norman changed the course of his outcome by doing something critically different. He did something that most of us would not do upon receiving such devastating news. Most of us would get a second opinion, take massive amounts of medication, seek ongoing treatment, and finalize our affairs; thoughts and actions that support a belief in an impending death. However, at that critical moment Norman did three things that would ultimately change the course of what he was to experience. He chose to believe in his own manufactured cure, not the illness. Furthermore, he took action to reinforce with his conscious mind this belief. He cemented his new thoughts into his mind until they formed a belief. This is what Norman Cousins did:

1. He fired his doctor and left the hospital to check into a hotel. He believed that the hospital signified defeat and overmedicating was not good for his health. He found a doctor who would work with him as a team member as opposed to one insisting on being in charge.

2. He began to get injections of massive doses of vitamin 'C'.

3. He obtained a movie projector and a pile of funny movies including old Marx Brothers films and Candid Camera shows. He spent a great deal of time watching these films and laughing. In spite of being in a lot of constant pain, he made a point of laughing until his very stomach hurt from it.

How did Norman Cousins fair? Well, he finally did die. However, it was not until November 30, 1990! 26 years after he was told to get your affairs in order.

I will have more to say about Norman Cousins in a minute. First, when I was in my early twenties, I smoked. During that time, someone gave me a cassette tape with subliminal messages intended to help a person quit smoking. The tape contained instrumental music with secret messages supposedly embedded within the songs. I was instructed to listen to this tape three times a day for two weeks. At the end of the third day, the tape’s instructions said I would not crave a cigarette and would give them up. I was instructed to listen to the tape for the entire two week period as reinforcement.

I have no idea if that tape was actually embedded with smoking cessation messages. However in 1989, I believed the tape contained actual messages that worked. The result was that I quit smoking. I did two things very similar to what Norman Cousins did. (1) I believed in an outcome (that I would quit smoking) and (2) I took action to reinforce my belief (I listened to a tape that I believed would help). Norman Cousins watched movies and laughed. He also took doses of vitamin C, again another measure that aided in developing the belief that he could heal himself. Because he allowed new thoughts and took action to reinforce those thoughts, he altered his reality to one of wellness. The power reinforced action has upon a belief you are cultivating cannot be underestimated.

Why are doctors baffled by cases like Norman Cousins? Why can't we all duplicate his method? The cure lies in the belief in wellness, not in the method. People cure themselves all the time through outrageous methods that they believe work. It is the belief that produces the outcome, not the method. Wellness is created within the mind, not treated upon the body.

Several years after I had quit smoking, I recall talking to co-workers about my method (subliminal tapes) for quitting smoking as we sat for lunch on a particular day. To this day, I still recall a particularly offensive comment by a lady who was about ten years my senior. She said, “Really, Christina a smart girl like you falling for those subliminal tapes. You should know better than that! Those tapes are pure garbage!”

That comment really stung at first. Years later though, I realized that the method I used really did not matter. The method was not smart or dumb, proven effectual or proven ineffectual. It was not practical or a bunch of hype. What mattered was that I believed in the outcome that my method would produce. Since I believed in the outcome, the method worked. A subliminal tape would never have worked for my co-worker because she did not share my belief in its ability.

Will laughter work to cure your illness? Will treatment or medicine work? Will prayer work? Or will nothing work? Do subliminal tapes work? I produced an outcome from the tape. She more than likely would not be able to duplicate my result. Is my co-worker right or am I? Essentially, neither one of us is right and neither one of us is wrong. We both get exactly what we believe in. What you believe matters!

I want to share another aspect of Norman Cousins’ case with you. Norman Cousins served as an Adjunct Professor of Medical Humanities for the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. He did a lot of research on the biochemistry of human emotions, which he believed were the key to success in fighting illness.

As you think, so you feel; and the only way to feel is to think! Your feelings are the navigators of your thought. Feelings are intended to help direct your thoughts to harmony and prosperity all while leading you away from dissonance and despair. Your reality follows your predominant thoughts and beliefs. If you feel well, you are thinking well. If you feel sick, crummy, lonely, depressed, devastated, or if you have that awful sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, then be warned. Your thoughts will produce a reality that follows along the path of those thoughts. Feelings remind you to keep thinking along a current path by giving you a feeling of euphoria. They also send up red flags when your thoughts are damaging. That “pit” in your stomach is an urgent message to get off that thought frequency. See blog #25 and #26 to gain a greater insight into your feelings.

Norman Cousins saw a relationship between his emotions and his well-being. He incorporated laughter, love, faith and hope in his treatment plan. Emotions follow thoughts! If he had these emotions, his thoughts had to come first to produce them. The method of recovery was irrelevant; Norman Cousins’ foundation for wellness was already cemented in his thoughts.

The last thing I am encouraging anyone to do is stop their treatment in lieu of watching old Marx Brothers films. I am not trying to dictate a method for curing yourself. In our western culture, doctors play a prevalent role. We are accustomed to seeking their advice and treatment for our illnesses. We believe in our doctor’s healing abilities. We believe in pharmaceutical remedies. You cannot thrust off an illness if your beliefs still support the supreme ability of the medical community and the unmitigated power of disease. You cannot brush off your doctor and your illness, yet hold doubt in your mind as to your own ability to produce specific results. To do so would be dangerous.

When Norman Cousins took matters into his own hands, he still worked with his doctor. He still held beliefs about medicine and disease. In fact, it is his beliefs in disease that garnished him with illness. However, he held a much greater belief in his own healing ability and the power his emotions could contribute to his cure; thus making him secure in his belief that he could heal himself. He also found a doctor that supported his belief structure further propelling him towards success.

The message I want you take from this is one of hope. You are not at the mercy of a diagnosis. You are not at the mercy of the beliefs of a doctor. You are at the mercy of what you believe; and thankfully you can change that.

You can change your outcomes by changing your thoughts. You must (and this is not an option), only permit thoughts of wellness, thoughts that make you feel good, thoughts of the ideal you in a state of wellness. You must be willing to squeeze out all thoughts of despair from your mind. And finally, you must believe that being well is an option for you. How many months do you have to live? Only you can determine that. Are you going to accept a 6 month sentence? Or like Norman Cousins are you going to believe in your cure?

The next step you must take is one of action. Act upon your beliefs. If you believe in the ability of a doctor, then by all means use one. However, find one who supports your course. This will lend further credibility to your newly seeded beliefs. Next, stop validating beliefs on illness. Only allow thoughts of your well-being to permeate your conscious mind.

It will be difficult at first. If you have read my blogs on the power of thoughts and beliefs, then you know they have the power to attract and repel; much like two sides of a magnet. What you experience will change as your predominant thoughts and beliefs change. A new reality of experiences may seem unapparent at first. However, you are building a new foundation thought by thought and until it is built up, it will be unapparent. Ultimately though, your new thoughts and beliefs will rise up and produce a reality just as consistent and cemented as your thoughts and beliefs are today. You must first believe in you!

I want to end by saying that there is nothing wrong with you if you are not able to become well. Nor is there anything wrong with you as you became ill in the first place. Illness is an experience. It is not something dysfunctional within you. You work well. I assure you. Your life is a series of experiences set about to enrich the conscious mind. Without distress, we would not know pleasure. Without sorrow, we would not know joy; and without pain we would not know love.

The conscious mind is on a journey to enrich itself. It enriches itself through experience; when you have a traumatic experience you are also enriched by its opposite. There is great benefit of which you may not even be aware of to all experiences. Did you consciously set out to make yourself ill so you could experience an appreciation for wellness? If you do not hold an awareness of the power your thoughts have, then you probably did not consciously direct your thoughts towards illness. However, you did not consciously direct them away from illness either. You let your thoughts stroll towards an experience. You can alter your experience if you chose to do so now by taking command of your thoughts.

Please feel free to email me privately at christinabialas@gmail.com if you are struggling with an illness, have a question or comment on my blog. I would also encourage you to read my entire blog as the material presented here is a supplement to other sections. To understand how to cure yourself, you must understand how you work. How you work, why you seek the enrichment of experiences, why a person would attract illness versus wellness, how your cells attract, how your feelings work, understanding doubt, your belief system, setting your ideals, planting successful succeeds of thought and more are contained within my blog. To repeat it here would be redundant.

#42 Universal Imagination

2011-11-18T17:58:00.000-08:00

We are connected to each other by way of the Universal Mind. And through this connectivity unlimited resources are available. Recall that there is no more energy in the universe today than a billion years ago. Nor is energy created. All energy that exists has always existed and will always be the same energy to exist. Since you are connected to everyone and everything through energy, and all energy now is the same energy that has always been, you are connected to everything, everyone and all thoughts in what you think of as past, present and future. Contained within each of us is omnipotent power laying latent waiting for retrieval. We are linked to this force. If we feel we are not creative or talented it is only because we have not tapped our own resources.

Tapping into your imagination is much like tapping a syrup tree. Once triggered, the ideas flow. By poking a little here and a little there your imagination springs like an unstoppable leak. Ideas appear to come suddenly out of nowhere. Since you have not learned to tap this internal resource, you are baffled into thinking external resources give ideas, such as a person, or TV commercial or an object spotted. However, these ideas have always been available within you and have been within your command. You too are multi-talented, creative and capable of conceiving the exact magnitudes that others have originated.

Your imagination is open and free. It is permitted to create anything. Think about the inexhaustible amounts of potential creativity within your mind. You can create purple trees with green faces, invisible rocks that walk, and three legged dogs that talk all within the confines of your mind. There is absolutely no limit as to what you can think. Since your imagination is free to create in whatever it endeavors any limits are limits that you think you have. If you think you are bound to mediocre ideas, your file on mediocrity is retrieved. When you accept that you are unchained, unrestricted and unhampered by thought activity, a bountiful of ideas comes brilliantly to mind.

You liberate your imagination by diffusing distorted and inconsistent beliefs that are not congruent with what you are attempting to achieve. We arrive back at our ideals finding the only way to imagine ideal possibilities is by relieving ourselves of the burden of our beliefs holding us back. As we do this we start imagining ideals instead of best case scenarios. We imagine the impossible as possible.

Your imagination holds an unlimited plethora of potential ideas waiting for energetic stimulus to trigger it. Thought is that energetic stimulus firing off. Consider how effective brainstorming is. The thoughts produced are retrieved inwardly. The information revealed was always contained within the realm of your reach and existed prior to your retrieval. When you focus inward in search of specific information, information presents itself.

Understand that this information exists now and is available to you now. Your mind holds active thought but also holds unlimited chunks of thoughts and ideas for your inspection when you are ready to receive them. They are there for the asking.

The direction of your imagination relies upon your focus. What you focus upon matters. Thoughts serve as the building blocks of your imagination stacking upon one another like multi-directional bricks and mortar. Your thoughts attract other like thoughts building upon wildly imaginative ideas.

Your imagination is self-directed and centers concentrically around one idea to the exclusion of other ideas when it is deliberately directed. This is the law of attraction at work. As you imagine different colors of the rainbow, colors of all sorts are returned. Your imagination cannot interrupt your directed thoughts on rainbow color and deliver instead types of fish. If you direct your thinking, your imagination returns thoughts on the direction of your thinking. If you think of nothing specific, ideas roam. If you focus upon lack and despondency, your natural trail of imaginative thought provides threads of connected thoughts to lack and despondency. Conversely, directing your thoughts and imagination away from lack and despondency and towards abundance and harmony provides plentiful imaginative thoughts in that direction. You can direct your imagination to work on your ideals. Ideals are returned to when you do. In this case you are using your imagination to extreme benefit.

Undisciplined thoughts lead to haphazard results. Conscious mind is creative and expansive. Thought expands the minds and evolves the self. Restricted imaginative thoughts hamper growth and expansion. Your duty is to free your imagination from restraining beliefs allowing imaginative dilation. Once the shackles on your imaginative powers are loosened, and thoughts are steered in a constructive direction, your experiences will change. Growth will occur.

As you expand your imagination you become greater than what you are because we are all in a constant state of becoming. As we expand, we are rewarded with a richer experience and greater imaginative abilities. It is not that the abilities are improving as if a lack of knowledge existed, but rather, our imaginations are being stretched. The information is already available to you like an infinite connect-the-dot where the dots for connection always exist.

The Power of Diligence and Vision

2011-11-17T11:50:00.000-08:00

We have all experienced outcomes that are great, good, okay, mediocre, and complete and utter failures. I personally have experienced each of these at different points in my life. People who achieve astounding success have also experienced each of these outcomes. Think of Andrew Carnegie, Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling, Madonna, Martha Stewart, Steven Spielberg, or Bill Gates. These super successful people have had plenty of failures. However, in the areas of their life’s great moments, they achieved astounding success. The relevance is that my list of great moments includes outcomes that are great, but typical. Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey’s are just plain astounding. People who have achieved astounding levels of success do one thing differently; they have a vision and employ pure diligence.

I am sure most people think they understand what diligence is: Repeated effort targeted at a task. However, that is far from what diligence is. Diligence is not chipping away at the leaves in the back yard, studying until wee hours of the morning or working late hours at a job. Diligence is not the same thing as hard work.

During the time I owned rental properties, I had a friend who also owned a string of properties. This friend was constantly running from property to property checking on the progress of the rehab work. Often he would show up on the job only to remember that he had forgotten to bring some necessary painting supplies or other such items. Off he would rush to the other side of town to pick up paint. He would drop the paint off; then get back in his car and proceed to drive to same side of town he picked the paint up to check on a property he was rehabbing over there. His day was consumed with overlapping errands. There was no question that this friend worked hard. He worked long hours every single day nearly seven days a week. However, diligence is not persistently working hard. Diligence is not working long hours or sticking to the task at hand. Diligence is persistently working smart. And to work smart, one must have vision.

When you persistently work smart, it is with a plan or vision in mind. My friend never sat down to plan his day, considered what he wanted to accomplish or take time to plan his success. Since he had no plan he accomplished only a fraction of what he could have. He ended his day feeling overwhelmed and very much like there were not enough hours in the day to finish his work.

It is easy to view this friend as having poor time management skills. We could accuse him of being disorganized. We could even say he is inefficient. What we do not recognize are these same characteristics in ourselves as they are applied over the course of our lifetime. We fail to see how much of our life is an overlap of yesterday. We fail to see how inefficient we are at achieving our goals. And time management? Really, when are you going to get around to living the life you intended? Where he lacked a daily plan, most of us lack a vision for our life! Diligence is not persistently clamoring away at a job. Diligence is not organizational skills or great time management. Diligence is persistently acting upon your vision.

We never succeed at realizing our dreams because we do not act with diligence towards them. We work towards the wrong purpose. Most people have only a vague idea of what they want in life. Like my friend who had only a vague idea of what he wanted to accomplish each day. We want be wealthier, healthier or happier yet we have no real plan of achieving it or exactly what we mean. We hold only an abstract idea that we want more than what we have. Ultimately, we also are consumed by our day. While my friend overlapped many of his errands, our days to some degree are repeats of the one before. So little changes and so little is accomplished when we have no aim. One of my favorite quotes comes from the story of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I use this reference often in my writing as I think the wisdom is inescapably clear.

"Cheshire-Puss," she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where---" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"---So long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Martha Stewart, and anyone who has achieved astounding success simply new where they were heading. They had a vision and they worked diligently towards that vision. Remember, diligence means working persistently towards your vision. It does not mean I am a hard worker. Paraphrasing the Cheshire cat, you will arrive somewhere if you walk long enough. The somewhere should be your vision. However, most people do not take the slightest step towards their vision, ever!

If I ask you where you are heading and what your plan is for arriving there, would you know? Or would you answer, I don’t know? The sad truth is most people do not know where they are heading because they believe life happens to them. They do not take aim because they believe attempts are futile. Why bother! Why work diligently towards matters unobtainable!

I was reading recently that diligence runs contrary to human nature. The article stated that people are content to take the path of least resistance. It said that we want instant gratification. We do accuse ourselves of such mediocrity often.

However, what is the path of least resistance? The path of least resistance is what you are doing now! And it takes a whole lot of effort. You have an entire belief system structured to hold your now moment in place. You are in active attraction. Change requires effort too. A whole lot of change requires a whole lot of effort. After all you are trying to uproot a belief system.

Change will not occur until you (1) believe in a vision and (2) work towards that vision diligently. Diligence is work away from what you have and towards what you want. That is what Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and all others did. They plow horsed their way from point A to point B. Vision gave them aim. Diligence, which we said is action aimed at your vision, is what got them there. Vision is mental work. Diligence is persistent action aimed at your vision. The two combined turn you into an unstoppable force.

HOW YOU ACQUIRE VISION

Vision is your ideal image of you. I talked in depth about ideals in section #32 Living the Ideal Life, #33 Ideals Uncertainty and Problems that arise, #34 Creating your Ideals, and #35 Your Ideals, other People and Your Fears. You acquire vision by holding an unrestricted view of who or what it is you want to be. Your vision should be audacious! It should be extraordinary without compromise.

Once this vision of you is firmly cemented in the conscious mind, specific goals should be set. Goals are chunked down into steps. Steps are assigned tasks. What is the result? By following the tasks, you are sure to complete the steps. Once the steps are followed, your goal is reached. Upon completion of your goals your vision arrives. Reaching our vision is impossible when we neglect or refuse the process. Achieving your vision is absolutely inevitable when the process is followed.

I volunteer at my children’s elementary school. Every other Friday, I sit in the hall and work individually with first graders learning to read. As these blossoming readers struggle with a word, my job is to help them figure out the word. Compound words like baseball, cannot, sunflower, lifetime or fireworks are intimidating to these first graders. I can actually tell by the expression on their young faces that they have no idea how to tackle the word. However, I rarely have to tell them the word. Often it is only a matter of chunking it down. I cover up base and let them read ball. I then cover up ball and let them figure out the word base. They inevitably scream, “Baseball!” You arrive at your vision in much the same matter by chunking it down. Inevitably, you will arrive.

The conscious mind and the Universal Mind always provide for us in exact correlation to the thoughts and beliefs channeled through their gateway. Therefore, you must channel greater thoughts of your vision and restrict the entrance of status quo. Without fail, every super successful person has held strongly to a self-created vision supported by thoughts and beliefs propelled by diligent action.

Reality is materialized from our strongest thoughts and beliefs. The consistency that we see or status quo is not the path of least resistance. It is the epicenter of our greatest strength. Diligence is not against human nature. It is a part of human nature, albeit employed in the wrong direction most often; that is towards status quo. As you create a vision and consciously direct your thoughts towards that vision taking diligent action, your reality has to follow. It has absolutely no other choice. It is a Universal Law that you experience what you believe. Therefore, your vision must follow thought and action, thought and action, thought and action!

#41 Destination Imagination

2011-11-09T12:17:00.001-08:00

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” ~Albert Einstein

Imagination is the heart of your thoughts pumping ideas out the arteries of your beliefs Imagination stretches the boundaries of your belief system nudging it in new directions. Your imagination is a blank canvas open to thought suggestion. However, as you rattle your imaginative thoughts around you clearly decide which fit within the rigid structure of your belief system. Those ideas that fit neatly within the confinement of your beliefs are what you concentrate on. Restricted beliefs, unexamined in nature, limit the free flow of ideas. Consequently, your imagination is bound to some degree by your beliefs although you occasionally permit preposterous thoughts for entertainment value.

Understanding that your beliefs are only ideas you hold and not actual attributes promote the free flow of ideas. While you permit your imagination some degree of freedom, you will reel it in because your imagination follows your beliefs. For example, if you allow your thoughts to roam on plausible job opportunities, you will limit your ideas to those that are believable options to you. If you are an engineer, job opportunities within the scope of engineering would be entertained. Your beliefs would reject ideas too far from the core. Additionally, not only would you reject outliers, but your beliefs would prevent many imaginative ideas from migrating to you in the first place.

Similarly, people always looking to invent fresh new ideas or bring the latest concepts to market often struggle because they are accustomed to focusing on what already is. Your blinders must be removed from your imagination in order to see what is not but could be. Allowing unrestricted thoughts no matter how silly they seem loosens your imagination. For example, asking yourself to create a way that man can fly leads you down an exploratory road where anything is possible. When you let in what seems like wild ideas your imagination stretches.

If you hold a belief that you are limited, possibilities are kept from you. However, if you believe anything is possible then really anything becomes possible for you. Giving impossibilities, improbabilities, unrealistic or unlikely ideas consideration provides the elasticity needed to be imaginative.

Your imagination serves you bountifully when it is fully exercised and free to deliver. Asking questions differently promotes imaginative answers. For example, as an engineer you could ask: What companies might be interested in me? Conversely you could ask: If I could no longer worked as an engineer, what would I want to do? Or further yet you could ask: What investments could I make to earn a monthly income instead of working as an engineer? There are all sorts of questions you can ask your imagination to produce answers for. The problem with many of us is that we ask the same questions of ourselves and so provide very little opportunity for stimulating thought.

It does not occur to us that anything is possible so we operate our imagination within the compound of our existing experiences. Certain alternatives to our current situation are considered forbidden thoughts to us because they seem so implausible. When we consider the alternatives to our job, it is always through the eyes of what we are now (engineer). We define ourselves through our job, health status, educational levels and whatever other label we allow to attach. We believe what we are, not what we can be.

The boundaries that fence your imaginative mind are constructed by you through your beliefs. It is only because you believe that your ideas of you are limited that they are. The internal resources available to you are much more powerful than any found in physical form. When you look inwardly for the free flow of ideas, the power contained is revealed. All ideas flow inwardly out. Your imagination will flow freely when you appreciate and welcome ideas that come to mind. Squeezing ideas out or validating ideas as improbable, impossible or unrealistic causes these outliers to fade to the far edges of thought. They become unlikely called upon resources because they are not attracted by thought. As you graciously trust and respect your imaginative mind thoughts will respond whenever needed.

Remember, when imagination churns it flows through our beliefs. Too often we reject our imaginative ideas as impossibilities because we cannot comprehend as of yet how the idea will implement itself. We do not trust our own abilities because we feel limited by our physical form and therefore project these same limitations inwardly. However, form is produced from mental not physical attributes. Hence, the barriers that we erect are our own. When we realize this we can break free of our barriers and accept our imaginative ideas as valid considerations. That is not to say every wild thought need be followed but rather every wild thought should not necessarily be dismissed either since the Universal Mind bars nothing from entering into physical form. For in the seed of every wild thought is an original idea.

# 40 Deciphering Between Money & Abundance

2011-10-31T10:54:00.000-07:00

There is a difference between being abundant and wanting money. Abundant means your needs and wants are provided for. You have plenty. You give freely because your needs are freely met. You understand that everything is available to you and so do not see the need to hoard. The more you give the more you receive because by giving you are not noticing the lack. When you give away you are signaling yourself that you are abundant. Giving therefore is a declaration that you have plenty!

It is easy to retreat to thoughts of lack by hoarding what you have. When you hoard, it is under the reign of your beliefs saying: Do not give away. You will miss me someday. You do not have enough. You will regret it when I’m gone. You will have less! Everything you want exists now and can be drawn to you anytime. As you understand this, you give freely. When you give freely, you reinforce this expectation that you are abundant and do not need; you therefore free yourself from the restrictive belief in lack.

A word of caution about money: most people want an abundance of money. They try to expect it but have trouble producing it because money is really not what anybody wants. People want the lifestyle they think money buys. They want money to buy their dream house, quit their job, take a vacation, and pay off bills. By putting your focus on money, you take your focus off what you really want and deny yourself the abilities of getting what you want by other methods. You restrict your paths.

By letting go of “wanting money” and putting your sights smack dab on your dream house than your dream house will reveal its way. It might come via money or it could come from an idea that popped into your head. It can come in any way to you by avoiding money as its sole path. Money may be included within the means that it travels to you. For example, that fantastic invention that pops in your head or a great idea for a payable screenplay could provide a means of securing the house through money. Understand that people that have money, created their world which includes money but money was not the sole source of their inspiration. They had a passion they pursued to which money seeded the passion. You either want to be a singer or you want a million dollars. The two are separate visuals. Since you want what money produces, your focus needs to be on the product not the money.

For Christmas my daughter put money on her wish list. As she just turned 6, I wondered why a 6 year old would request money. “To buy a kitten,” she replied when I asked her. “Then why don’t you just put kitten on the list,” I said.

Step Two: Consider new thoughts

Once you have visualized your ideal outcome and provided clarity of details, your next step is to attract your outcome. To attract your ideal outcome, your thoughts and expectations need to be on the same frequency as your ideal outcome. You must think about what you want. You cannot create ideals, provide some pictures and then get on with the mundane of your day. You have to spend time concentrating on your ideals until they are excitingly close to you. You will know they are coming because you will have that on top of the world feeling.

Remember, you are creative and seek opportunities to learn and enrich yourself. If materializing your thoughts into physical reality were a steady stream towards perfection, there would be no value to the experience. The value is in the relationship of experiences. Like the relationship of north to a position and motion to time, your enrichment relies upon the relativity of your experiences. There is not a good vs. bad spectrum of experiences. Everything you experience is relative to other experiences. You cannot know good without knowing bad, happiness without sadness, and life without death. You need reference points.

As you master your skills you too will be filled with appreciation and gratitude for your abilities. You will be enriched far greater due to your experiences and understanding of them, rather than if you rather blandly stream-lined toward your ideals. There would be no knowing an ideal situation without familiarity of less than ideal.

Consider your ability to taste the vast pleasures of sweet and sour, bitter and salty. If in your experience you tasted only applesauce, you would have deprived yourself the pleasure of alternate flavors such as the saltiness of chips or the tartness of a pickle. But it is through trying a variety of flavors that you develop references as to what you like. The more flavors you try, the greater your appreciation grows of flavors. If someone were to come along and offer you a life of just applesauce, you would likely say “no way.”

So it is with your growing achievements. As you sample your world, an appreciation grows of your acquired skills. You are creating your own reference points and growing in appreciation of your abilities, whether or not you realize it. Just because you have tasted bitter your whole life, does not mean you need to deny yourself the sweetness that life has to offer.

Too sample other flavors of life, your thinking needs to evolve. Evolve remember is to change. Knowing what to think is sometimes more difficult than deciding what you want. Be aware. Your old thinking habits lie in the trenches and offer the comfort of a well worn shoe. Awareness alone will not promulgate fresh thoughts. Concentrated effort will.

Start by asking yourself how your thinking would differ if your idealized vision were occurring this moment. What would your thoughts be? What new thoughts would present themselves? What previous thoughts would be unnecessary? If, for example, the idealized vision of you were that you weighed 130 pounds, what thoughts would you have? What thoughts do you think would not be necessary anymore? It is not enough to say think skinny thoughts. You need to identify what are skinny thoughts and what are fat thoughts. Create the ideal. Embed your ideal with painted clarity within your mind. Expect it and it will be yours.

As long as you store your ideals in the future, that is where it will sit. Always evasive and always slipping from your grasp like a fish off your reel. But if your hook is well baited and you keep your pole in the water, if you persist at the task at hand with concerted effort then your fish will chomp down on your hook incapable of escape.

Bait your hook and expect the fish to come. Like a fisherman you must have patience. You would not throw a hook in the water in doubt of your abilities. You would patiently wait for the fish to bite. You would expect a bite. Why would you expect a bite? From experience you know fish will bite. You expect them to and your expectations will go rewarded.

Use expectations to your advantage. Know what you are expecting. Construct thoughts that enhance your expectations. Above all, learn to expect your ideals from your well- built thoughts. Excitement, dread or the fear that you feel upon expecting are your feelings messaging you that energy form is on the way. Eliminate destructive expectations. Force constructive feel good thoughts and expectations. Your experiences will follow directly representing your efforts.

#39 Find the Opportunity

2011-10-27T17:39:00.001-07:00

Our daily lives change little according to our fantasies about how they should because we lend relatively little thought to shaping our future. We need to interrupt our current pattern of thinking giving a complete upheaval to some of our existing beliefs in some cases.

We need to expect different experiences for ourselves. We need to work harder at this then anything we have ever done in our lives. It is work. However, it is work of the unbound creative mind and that in of itself should excite and entice you.

Is it any wonder that exactly what you have been expecting each day shows itself in your life? The bad day, the more work than you can handle, the car problems, the higher than average bills, housework that’s never done. Occasionally, you will stop the pity party long enough to wish for an abundant future, but the pictures you paint are so poorly constructed and your expectations of their occurrence so doubtful they are never given the opportunity to reveal themselves.

Take a moment to consider everything you have expected to happen in the last week. How about the last year? What about the last decade? The answer is nothing but what you currently have in your life right now. That is what you have been expecting and that is what has shown up. Unless you decide right now to change your thoughts and therefore your expectations, then your tomorrow and the next day and a year from now will look exactly like today. You have been living in Groundhog’s Day.

The opportunity in expectations is two-fold. This is another profound secret to harnessing your supreme power. First, your current expectations reveal much of your current thought process. If you are unsure what your thoughts have been or what lies in your future, take a moment and jot down exactly what you expect for the coming week or coming month. Do it right now. If your dream vacation or job promotion is not on that list then you have not been diligent in preparing for it. The time is always now to do something about it. And what you expect is always what you have been thinking about. Your expectations are a window into your beliefs and thoughts. So ask yourself often, “What am I expecting.”

The second opportunity allows you to set your expectations. You can start with your ideal expectations and work backwards into developing specific thoughts. Take a moment and review your list of expectations for the coming week or month that you just jotted down. If you are like most people, it will look something like this: I expect to clean the house today, cook dinner, and do laundry. Tomorrow, I will start the work week, get a tune-up on the car, run errands, attend a conference, pick up the dry cleaning, and mow the lawn…

Much of what you expect is a repeat of what you have been expecting. You have become an expert attractor of what you currently have. The problem is you do not know how to expect different results because it has not occurred to you until now to expect differently.

Most people often are unsure what to expect because they have not clarified for themselves exactly what to expect within their ideals. The picture of the abundant future has never been worked out. How can you begin to act with expectation when you have no idea what you are expecting?

To attract your ideals, you must state specifically what your ideals are followed by your expectations of their appearance. Consider the thoughts you would have if the outcome were occurring right now. Then think those thoughts. Paint those pictures. Produce those feelings. Expect the result.

Expecting inconsequential events or objects, such as receiving a small check in the mail or attracting a specific feather, do materialize because detailed focus is given through thoughts. We are able to visualize results because expecting one or two incidental changes is both believable and doable.

Breakdown occurs when uprooting our current mode of life is desired. We want our pendulum to swing from lack to abundance. However, two problems exist that we need to overcome. First, most of us do not know what we want and so we fail to provide clarity. Second once we provide at least some degree of clarification, we do not achieve the proper thought patterns to get us from lack to abundance. Finally, we figure out what we what! What thoughts do we need to entertain to achieve it? That is our dilemma.

We do not achieve the proper thought patterns because we do not know what to think about. I want a brand new black Mercedes! What do I think about? We end up slipping quite easily back into our comfortable thought patterns of expecting what we always expect because we know how to work that model. We often do not stick with our newly forming thoughts. They are easy to abandon in favor of our well-trodden ones.

Step One: Know what you expect

We change our expectations by setting our expectations according to our ideals. Know what you want. Visualize your ideal life. Without overwhelming yourself, take an area that you want to improve right now. Write a paragraph or two on your ideal of this event. Write exactly what the vision of you is. You may not indicate what you do not want. You may not settle for or what you kind of like. You must write exactly what you see yourself doing, living, behaving, and enjoying.

Once you have clarified one or two expectations, put your list in a visible place and remind yourself often that this is what you expect. Say out loud, “I expect….” And then name each item on your list.

Once you know what you are expecting, your work is developing specific thoughts centered at driving the materialization of that event. When you develop your thoughts they should be in direct alignment with how your thinking would be if the event were actually occurring now.

Do not just pin your expectations on the refrigerator and forget about them. ACT upon them. Ask yourself: What would I do right now if my expectations were occurring? Then take some form of action. If a brand new Cadillac is on your list and you had the money in hand now to purchase it, wouldn’t you test drive the Cadillac? Is the space in your garage cleared for it? If not, go clear a spot. Acting with intent to receive is a powerful tool because your thoughts, emotions and expectations coincide. You cannot help but think about the Cadillac when you are sitting in it. You can help but visualize it when it is right in front of you. And you cannot help but feel joy behind the wheel. When thoughts, feelings, expectations and mental pictures come together at the same coordinate point results will soon follow.

Additionally, you have to keep acting with intention to receive. Remember we talked about these brief interludes of momentary enthusiasm are not enough to counteract what has been built up. A demolition ball hits a building many times before it finally collapses. Ultimately the building falls. You have to keep swinging away at your old thoughts and beliefs to get them to submit. Make your mental efforts daily. Consider how many times a day you give thought to your current condition. You give a lot of thought to your current situation. In fact, most of the day is devoted to your current forecast. Remember those 60,000 thoughts a day working to crank out more of what you already have? Do you really think a few brief thoughts are enough oomph power? The work in front of you must be diligent counteractive thought. That is the only way to change your current experience.

Before you answer with uncertainty as to what your thoughts should be, let me remind you that you are whole with the universe. All information is available to you that you seek. The answers as always are within you. How should you act? You should act as though you are receiving, as though you have arrived and as though you are living your ideal.

Occasionally, a role model is beneficial in aiding with thought development. If there is a specific person whose thoughts and behavior you can model, by all means take advantage of mirroring them. Listen to how they speak, adopt their body language, consider what thoughts enter their mind and what thoughts are absent from their habitual pattern.

Why do you think Martha Stewart is wealthy? What thoughts do you think she has? What thoughts do you think are barred entry from her mind? What about JK Rowlings, author of the very successful Harry Potter Books? What thoughts do you think must enter her mind? Bill Gates thoughts? Identifying with a person that is already where you see yourself arriving aids in thought selection. While you may not be able to get inside the mind of Bill Gates, you can certainly make note of his body language, gestures, confidence, voice tone, words he uses and words he does not use. All of these are signals to his thoughts. You do not have to be a mind reader to know Bill Gates does not think in terms of what cannot be done.

Try to figure out what drove your role model. Think in terms of what their ideals must have been. I assure you money was not the motivating factor. It is always something else. The key to becoming successful is not by imitating a role model. The key is in figuring out what your role model was trying to achieve, then reaching for the same ideals.

#38 Expectations, Receiving & Your Beliefs

2011-10-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

To expect is to act with certainty that an event will occur. Your thoughts, your physical perceptions of reality, your beliefs and your feelings provide cross validation and work in unity to ensure results. Expectations work within our belief structure. They are our believable outcomes. We do not expect what is not believable to us. Expectation is exactly the source used to draw into existence our painted thoughts. As we think with clarity of our ideals, we come to expect their results.

However, you cannot forge expectations. There is a correlation between the strength of your expectations and the materialized result. The greater the expectation the more likely the result will produce accordingly. Doubtful expectations produce imprecise results. Similar to the monster under your bed or the rich uncle showing up on your doorstep, that which you hold any doubt about will not show. Hence, your expectations are indications of what you believe will happen; not what you hope will happen.

Believing in your abilities is the only way to gain expectancy of the results. You must have unwavering faith in yourself, solid and enduring. When you act in absolute faith results will follow. Checking constantly for results only produces skepticism. You would not need to check if you really believed you would receive. For example, it is normal for you to expect a bill to come in the mailbox. You do not have to inspect the mailbox several times a day for the result. You know a bill will appear. However, you do not expect an unanticipated check. Therefore as you approach the mailbox, you do not expect the unanticipated check with the same fervor as you do the bill. You know the bill will be there. You doubt delivery of a check. Guess which shows up?

Consider how you have come to expect: your weekly paycheck, your car to be in the garage when you awake in the morning, or the morning newspaper to be delivered in the paper box. These examples demonstrate your ability to expect a result with absolute certainty. That feeling of absolute certainty is how you want to expect your ideals and it is that feeling that you want to get in tune with. By in tune, I mean, get to know the frequency by paying attention to your thoughts and feelings as you check the mailbox, retrieve the newspaper, or slide into your car. By concentrating on reproducing the expectant feelings towards your ideals, your thoughts become in sync with your ideal since you think first, feel second.

Feelings are produced from our thoughts. We do not always know what to think in order to produce a result, but we do know which thoughts produce specific feelings. If I ask you to produce thoughts that will secure an abundant future for you, would you know which thoughts to think? What if instead, I ask you to think thoughts that make you feel emotionally elated, sad, or angry? You could easily muster up thoughts.

Since we navigate our thoughts through the use of our feelings, we are very comfortable with our feelings. We know the right thoughts to extract to produce the according feeling. We quite commonly are interested in how people feel, not such what they think. We want to know what it feels like to win the lottery, be famous, successful, well, etc. If we know the feeling, we can produce the thoughts. Since we do not know what feelings unknown experiences produce, we are curious as we search for clues.

Ultimately, you do know what it feels like to expect. You will come to know what living your ideals feels like too. However, you must expect them first through your known thoughts of expectancy. As your ideals arrive, you will become comfortable enough with their feel as well in order to perpetuate them. Using the feelings you are familiar with to produce the results you have come to expect is where you begin.

Be aware of any doubt settling in. Recall doubt always caters to your present belief system. It signals that your thoughts (I am getting a check in the mail) are contrary to your beliefs (unanticipated checks do not appear). You know cannot draw forth that which goes against your beliefs since the vibrational strength of your beliefs energy will repel it. Doubt is your present beliefs making a strong show of strength. You have to deliberately concentrate on laying the groundwork of the new thought avoiding doubtful thoughts entirely.

Expectations fall short when they are unbelievable to you. The size or the amount of what you are expecting does not matter unless you think that smaller or less significant amounts or items are easier to produce. If you hold a belief that a dollar is easy to produce but a thousand seems impossible, then for you expecting a thousand dollars will be very difficult until you alter your belief.

We know that our thoughts are attractors of energy. Energy can form anything. It is just as easy to produce one million dollars as it is to produce one dollar. Your thoughts attract the energy that binds into form. To the units of energy, it does not matter what form it is molded into…one million dollars, one dollar or even a five dollar bill…energy attracts and forms based upon the vibrational frequency of your thoughts. It is equally easy to produce either option. Your beliefs are the only limiting factors influencing the frequency drawn.

Think of you current beliefs, including doubt, as a gigantic magnet. Consider your fresh new thought as a much smaller magnet approaching this super-sized giant. Both magnets approach each other with a show of repelling sides. What happens? The smaller magnet cannot endure the force of the much larger magnet and is thus cast off. Knowing the strength you are up against, you must empower this fresh new thought by attentively standing behind it. You have to hold this thought intentionally in your focus which allows it to gain the strength necessary to stand its ground. As you hold the new thought in your mind, its power grows through attraction. With enough practice, this thought will become large enough to challenge your old belief.

People who have successfully drawn abundance to themselves held a belief that they were able to succeed. These thoughts were planted firmly in their mind. Others worked on restructuring faulty beliefs that prevented abundance from coming their way. Either way, the end result is that they needed to believe first, receive second.

Often our belief that money, success or wellness is on the way is doubted because the source of that relief is not known to us. Where could additional money come from? How are we going to be successful? Who would provide our cure? How are these bills going to disappear? How soon will change occur? Focusing on the where, how, and who are all obstacles as we have learned. All we need to do is focus on the end result letting the path work its way out. Focus should always be kept on the ideal not the path to the ideal. An infinite amount of paths exist to connect you to your ideal. When you hone in on just one or two paths, you eliminate all other potential pathways; pathways you might not even consider otherwise.

Life is unplanned event. Treat your ideals with the same zest, vigor, spontaneity, and excited enthusiasm as you would an upcoming surprise party. Excite yourself with the anticipated arrival. Know your ideals are coming and look forward to their appearance. Do not try to plan each step in the process as they make their way to you. Enjoy the moment and look forward to their expected arrival.

I held a firm belief several years ago that money would find its way to me. I did not know how. However, I held the belief. Within just a few short weeks, not one but two checks arrived in the mail each for roughly $1,000. The money came from a title company. Apparently, there had been a mistake in closing costs associated with rental real-estate we had purchased over a year prior. Money finds a path. Wellness finds a path. Success finds a path.

How many times have you focused on abundance only to disregard a good idea that pops in your mind? Or maybe you walk right by that hidden treasure at a garage sale? How many times have you been pessimistic about a new health regimen that you just read about in the latest version of Reader’s Digest? What about that empty building you drive by each day that would be perfect for the auto body business you dream of starting? Opportunities that are trying to connect with you flop when action is not taken and beliefs are unsupportive.

In just a moment, I will share another story with you that I believe illustrates heartily two points. First it confirms that we do not need money for things and second it demonstrates that things find a path. Before I tell you the story, consider that the major obstacle that we need to overcome with our expectations is this: We do not need money for things. Attracted energy finds a path. Attracted energy does not need to be purchased. It is not for sale. It needs thought excitement to mold it. That is all. Break money down and you will find it is made of the same energy that you are made of. Excite its energy and it will be drawn to you, just like in cases of people winning the lottery multiple times. It is that same excited energy that draws these repeat winnings to them. Unfortunately, as these big winners focus changes from winning the lottery to spending their winnings, they lose it all. Money is never what we are after. It is always the accomplishment of creating that pleasures us. Focusing on what is an attractive outcome for you (your ideal) ensures you will not only receive it but keep it. Lottery winners attract money because they lend obsessive thoughts to money. Most of the rest of us want what money buys but end up focusing on obtaining the money to get the thing. When you fail to expect because you think you need money to get the thing, then your eye is on the path not the thing. The thing is then held from you because your focus is on the money. Instead of focusing on the thing, you focus on not having enough money for the thing. So nothing is returned to you. You get lack because that is the only thing you gave focus to.

Now to my story: During a particular week, my mother began thinking how nice it would be to have a wrought iron bistro set for her patio. She cut out a picture of a patio bistro set she liked from a magazine setting the photograph on her countertop. Off she went to the store looking for similar bistro sets to the picture of one she had clipped out. She did find a couple similar sets for several hundred dollars, but the prices were too high and the quality was flimsy. She continued to think of her bistro set for the next couple of days without knowing how she would acquire one but keeping the idea of the set planted firmly in her mind.

Unbeknownst to me of her desire for a bistro set, I set out to garage sale on Thursday of the same week she began her search. She never mentioned to me that she was looking for a set, nor did I have any idea she wanted one. That day at a garage sale I found a beautiful vintage wrought iron bistro set for $13. The set looked weathered but it was solid. I knew that vintage sets like the one I found can easily be refinished and sold for top dollar. I immediately purchased the set for $13 and brought it home with the intention of touching it up to resell.

I had the opportunity to show that bistro set to my mother later the same day I found it. Her eyes lit up when she saw it. I could tell immediately she had an interest in it so I asked her if she wanted it. She told me that she had searched for a bistro set just days ago but had come up empty handed. The story ends this way. I gave my mother the bistro set as a Mother’s Day gift the Sunday immediately following my purchase and just days after her search began.

Things find paths. My mother did not need to spend or acquire several hundred dollars to purchase a bistro set. She did, however, get a vintage bistro set worth so much more than the new models, and she got it for free! She received it as a Mother’s Day Gift. When you believe, you expect. When you expect, you receive. The path finds the way to the object.

What you believe matters when it comes to getting what you expect. Half-hearted attempts at expectation will provide second-rate results. Forcing yourself to feel the elation you will feel when that check arrives or when you get that job promotion aids in attracting the experience because thought power is focused on producing those feelings just like I mentioned earlier. It is the way that you think when you are expecting that changes your course. You cannot expect without thinking of what you are expecting. You also cannot feel emotionally charged without thinking about how you will feel when you receive. So it is not the feeling of expectancy that you are trying to force, it is always thoughts!

You cannot feel emotion without first thinking a thought. Emotion always follows thought. It is not the other way around. Forced elation (feeling) is forced thought first. At first thoughts do need to be forced since you are not accustomed to having them occur naturally directed towards a purpose. You have allowed them to roam. However, by directing your thoughts towards accomplishing a specific feeling the right thoughts are produced.

How do you think with certainty in lieu of your current beliefs? You do it with deliberate intention by changing your beliefs, reforming your thought and altering your expectations. Your beliefs serve as filters for your thoughts, but your own free will allows you freedom of thought choice. Since you are the master architect of this seemingly impenetrable system of beliefs, you too can alter the plan design.

You have to be diligent in your thoughts and expectations for your beliefs to alter. Expectation becomes your ally in that it reminds you to think diligently about receiving. What are you expecting right now? If your ideals are not on that list, then you have not readied yourself to receive them. This is another of those profound secrets that guide you towards the ideal you! Knowing what you are expecting gives you a glimpse of where your thoughts are.

Often we hold our ideal in our future never to be presented to us because we do not expect our ideals to occur now. We expect them to arrive someday, just not today. As long as we hold our ideals at bay, they will stay at bay because they will exist where you put them. If you are waiting to catch up to your future ideals, you won’t! Now is all you ever have.

You view your world through points of inspection. Remember time is motion. If you expect time to lapse in order for you to expect your ideals, you will never catch up to them. You will always think that not enough time (motion) has elapsed. The only way to catch up to your ideals is to expect them now. You are responsible for setting that energy in motion. Energy comes through your drawing power. Your inspection point, which is energy already drawn to you, changes as you change it.

All sorts of thoughts run rampant through your mind. The thoughts that you turn your attention towards and focus on are the ones that you, knowingly or unknowingly, expect to materialize. Thoughts coupled with excitement, looking forward to something, confidence and great happiness are powerful attractors. Vacations in the near future, a visit by a loved one, an assured job promotion are examples of confident expectations. These events will become your reality.

Fear, worry, dread, doubt and all other forms of intensely negative emotional feelings are also great forms of expectation. Remember that. What you fear, worry and fret over are exactly those things you are attracting towards you through diligent negative thought expectation.

For many of us, we get stuck in this negative cyclical thought pattern without even realizing it. The more we worry over what to expect, the more things we get to worry about causing us further worries over what to expect. It is a powerful patterned attractor effective because we are quite adept at using it. These negative emotions, recall, are signals to us to change our thinking or else. When we ignore these signals, the undesirable appears. Unfortunately, we have come to expect bad things when these feelings present themselves because of our past history of allowing the thoughts and feelings to continue.

You can steer away from destructive outcomes only by changing your thoughts, forcing yourself if you must, to think of anything but what you dread or fear. However, if you do not hold your thoughts, allowing the pendulum represented by your thoughts to swing back to the side of lack and doubt, than you will be rewarded with lack and doubt.

Your intentions will produce results only when your focus is on the result appearing, not the absence of the result. You must always state what you want never what you do not want. Your focus needs to remain always on expecting your ideal.

#37 Clarity: The Pictures of you Mind

2011-10-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

You can close your eyes and conjure up familiar faces and beautiful places on the blackboard of your mind. It is the place where your dreams occur so vividly and imaginatively. This is the place that reality draws forth. The place in your minds space where your canvas is stored is your conscious mind.

Thoughts have mental pictures associated with them. These mental pictures are the imprints of the conscious mind into the Universal Mind. The clearer the picture, the clearer the imprint returns in physical form. It is not enough to think in terms of vocabulary. Mental pictures must be ingrained in your thoughts.

In attempting to alter your experience, it is very important to focus intently on mental pictures. Your conscious mind sends blue prints to the Universal Mind on what to construct. The clearer the prints, the clearer the image returned. The effects of specifically imprinting mental images cannot be overstated. Visualization is done in the mind, not with the eye. You already know how to do this. You think in terms of mental pictures already.

You can hold something in view of your eye such as a photograph of your ideal house, but it must be imprinted within the eye of the mind to become an actual physical thing. How often do you look at something without really seeing it? All the time, right? Take your watch for example. The average person looks at their watch dozens of times a day, yet often, cannot describe the face color, brand maker, or specific markings. Could you describe the man that bags your weekly groceries? What does he look like? What color are his eyes? Could you accurately describe the dashboard of your car? Do you know on which side of your dashboard the gas gauge is located? What is the background color of your dashboard? We look at objects all the time without really imprinting the details of the object into our mind. Unfortunately, we peruse our ideals with the same superficial imagery.

When you visualize your ideals you need to do it with clear details of your intention. The more vivid the details detained in your mind the superior the results. The pictures you paint should be of very specific outcomes. Seeing yourself at your ideal weight, calls for an accurate reflection of you at your ideal weight. What do you look like at that weight? What shape is your figure? Do you have muscle contours? What clothes do you wear? How fluidly do you move? You have to see you as that person.

Whatever you identify as your ideals, your ability to visualize them is an extremely powerful tool. You can think thoughts with small mental pictures appearing like pop up storms or you can give yourself the visual force of a stage 5 hurricane. It is the canvas of your conscious mind painting vivid pictures from mere suggestion that helps you draw experiences toward you more quickly.

Meditating connects you with the conscious mind. Quieting your mind and distilling your thoughts enables you to draw forth vivid images. It is in this quiet connection that your greatest power is. Thought is power. Concentrated thought is concentrated power. When you couple concentrated power kissed with the seeds of clarity than you have harnessed real profitable power. Unstoppable in terms of bringing you want you want.

Your strongest thoughts contain vivid mental imaginary. Rich images come to mind when I tell you to think of: your mom, a blade of grass, a static cling dryer sheet, a cotton ball. These thoughts are presented in the form of pictures that are easily retrieved. What do you conjure up when I tell you to think about: my mom, my house, or my car? You draw a blank, don’t you? You do not have mental pictures associated with these so the flashes of imaginary are fuzzy as you attempt to summon meaning. Now, picture you achieving your ideals. What are you doing? What do you look like? Where are you? If you cannot conjure up very specific vivid visuals quickly, then you have no blueprints. If you do not have blueprints then you are not registering what to construct from conscious mind to Universal Mind. Your strongest beliefs and thoughts are represented quite clearly with mental imagery. Your goal in achieving your ideals is to reflect them just as clearly in this mental mirror.

You have to see yourself living your ideals as if you have arrived. That is why physical action such as dressing like your boss, taking acting lessons, signing up for a marathon, scripting out the first few paragraphs of the play you want to write are so important. Actions contribute to mental pictures. As you construct the visual in your conscious mind, you believe and begin validating. The more you concentrate your efforts on your ideals, the more habitual the clarity of your thoughts will become. Your pictured thoughts will grow and attract. You will become unstoppable.

Ideals left unconstructed within the mind will fizzle, falter and fail you. When we fail to construct mental imagery of our ideals then they are kept from up since imprinting has not occurred from the conscious mind to the Universal Mind. There is simply no blueprint to register.

We think in terms of: thoughts with no pictures, thoughts with vague pictures and thoughts with very vivid pictures. Remember when I asked you to think of your mom? A picture of your mom popped into your head. But when I said think of my mom, you drew a blank. Drawing a blank is a signal that thought has not been lent in order for construction of a mental picture to occur. Consider the pictures you hold of your ideals. Do they hold the crystal clarity that your mother’s image calls forth? Or are your ideals cloudy pictures, like the thought of my mother? When we do think in terms of pictures, it is because thoughts are strong and habitual on the matter, like the mental image of a cotton ball. We need to create the thoughts of our ideals and imprint them into our mind in order for our reality to mirror our ideals back. Our ideal pictures must be as clear and as readily retrievable as the image of our mother. When you visualize with clarity power is harnessed.

Our thoughts do attract and the result is accumulative. All that you see before you is an accumulation of your past thoughts. We need to remember that since we are creative, we endeavor to create in our mind constantly. We enjoy and sometimes even derive emotional pleasure from creating thoughts within our mind. It satisfies our insatiable appetite to create. It is passive creativity to think, something we do to fulfill our needs much like an artist might doodle. We practice with our mind, toiling with ideas. Some will materialize and some will not materialize leaving us only mental satisfaction.

Clarity refines the oil of our thinking. Our thoughts produce mental images that eventually translate into physical form. Since our thinking has been so chaotic, we get bits and pieces of reality chucked back. Even our daydreams are ever changing illusions. Thought that is not visually clung to will not mold into a belief. We change the paint base from water to oil, the scenery, the texture, the colors, and the setting. Our pictures are a blending of our imprecision making for a murky mess.

How much is too much and how much is not enough? That depends upon your current capabilities. If you trust yourself, and soon you will, actualization will be taken for granted. You will expect results. And when you act with intent, results follow much faster.

We have to “set up” our future so to speak. Most of have thoughts that race through our head something like: Got to get the car washed on the way home. There is nothing in the freezer for dinner. Are we out of cat food too? I don’t know why my boss is in charge. I could do a better job. I wonder if I have a pencil in my car. A red light again…uh! I’m sick of red lights.

You get the picture don’t you? Thoughts running uncontrollably rampant like a stray dog. The quick pictures you conjure are of the pencil in your car, the red light, potential dinner choices. These pictures come masterfully easily because they are the pictures we create constantly. The pictures of our ideals are often left unattended to and so are hazy to us.

You can endeavor to do anything. You can accomplish many goals. You can be multi-directional and multi-talented in your accomplishments as long as you give clear directive thought power. If a big house on a lake is what you are after, then begin by painting just that picture. Every detail does not need to be in place. Foundations start from the bottom up. If you want a house on a lake, what does that house look like? Clarify for yourself your mental pictures grabbing those that are desirable. Hold the mental images within your mind. Your inner self is not clear on what it should attract. Until clarity is provided you will stick to the well-treaded paths of your beliefs. Without providing clarity your mixed thoughts will only reward you with mixed results.

Spend time clarifying each intended target area. See yourself in your minds eye achieving, living, and receiving. If everything is not yet known to you, don’t worry. Eventually you will become clear on what you want as you learn to use ideals. If you want a house on a lake but do not know where, think less about where and more about the house on the lake. The where will be provided.

What you spend time thinking about will be yours. The way will find itself. Know that you will receive once you define the “what.” The how, the where, and the who are not for you to figure out. Since it is the frequency that you are tuning yourself into you need not be concerned about how it will come to you. Know that it will be and be satisfied.

From an artist’s brush masterpieces are created. But it is with the first clear stroke that concentration begins on each small detail. An artist does not overwhelm. She starts with the petal of a sunflower and knows the sky will follow. As you build, your details will also evolve as you idealize more.

Our ability to visualize our ideals is immeasurable. It is those pictures that you paint in the dusty corners of your mind that give rise to feelings and actualization. Your senses aid in painting those pictures. Feelings provide feedback to the clarity you construct. You feel exceptionally good when you are engaged in vivid thought of your ideals. As you gain that pleasurable feeling know your distinct thoughts are engaged properly.

You can think, “I’m rich, I’m rich, I’m rich,” but coupling that thought with a visualization is a power path to actualizing. Thinking and seeing with your mind whips the winds of change in your direction. What do you want? Give yourself a very clear picture what it is.

If you give yourself sketchy pictures that stop short of your dreams then your dreams will not actualize. If you focus on your ideals today, tiring of the mental labor tomorrow, then the mixed messages produce a shook up version of reality. Half baked attempts at clarity provide mediocre results.

If you are unwilling to actively draw your future, it will still be drawn for you. Make no mistake about it. However, it will hold nothing but the scattering of thoughts which you lent to it. If you assess your life based on its extremes or mediocrities, your predominant thoughts will be demonstrated.

You need to draw those pictures for yourself in such a way and look at them as often as you can to produce that “automatic thinking.” The clarity and concentrated efforts which you lend your thoughts will determine the clarity of the results produced. Cloudy thoughts equal cloudy results. Crystal clear thoughts equal fine crystal results.

Employ as many of your senses to aid in the quickness of your results. Give your mind that gas it needs to churn the wheels. One thought on the subject, one clear thought, will lend itself to another and another. Soon each of these thoughts will be imbedded so deeply into your conscious mind that these will be the only accepted thoughts and pictures. Those of lack, illness, poverty and doubt will be banned from entry.

Since thought holds form, you must hold your thoughts. Yet when it comes to employing these techniques to our mental attitudes, we let them run wild like an undisciplined child. However like a child, your mental abilities do not need to be monitored, controlled and told what to do constantly. At first, a small child requires more supervision. However as the child matures mentally, less attention is required. Children require direction and discipline, so do your thoughts. Sometimes just a subtle suggestion works but other times very specific discipline is required.

Think of thought training much like you would teach a child to tie their shoes, write their name or learn to climb a tree. You spend limited amounts of very concentrated effort on each of these tasks. They do not consume you. However, you do repeat the teaching with extreme detail UNTIL the child has learned to tie his shoe, write her name or climb the tree. This is what you need to do with your thoughts. Train yourself UNTIL you learn.

We have power over circumstances employable through the clarity of our thoughts. The longer we hold our pictures within our mind, the more secure they will become in the physical world. We will start to believe them.

Whenever you feel the gnarling claws of discontent in the ranks, the shadows of doubt or the dueling swords of indecision, take the opportunity to idealize for yourself exactly what you want to occur. Then paint that mental picture. Ben Franklin lists simply will not do.

You have permission to dream. You have permission to idealize. Everything that you could ever want already exists. It exists in the form of potential energy waiting for your like thoughts to pull it together into form; to organize it. When you consider it this way, it is not a matter of the have’s or the have not’s. It does not matter the extent of your education level is or the lack of success you have experienced to date. It is a matter of intently applying your power of thought attracting to you what you desire by molding energy form. That is how your physical reality is expressed and comes to be. It is unbound timeless energy waiting for form; waiting for pictures. Anyone can be abundant.

#36 Mass Hysteria & Sand traps of the Mind

2011-10-20T03:04:00.000-07:00

MASS HYSTERIA

“[Moral thinking] is debased and poisoned by the influence of society’s weakest and most ignoble elements, the herd”~Welshon 16.

Much of what we think impacts others when a community holds negative views. Our thoughts impact our experience. When we publicize destructive thoughts we begin to plant destructive beliefs. We validate each other’s thoughts based upon what we have read or heard, thus mushrooming an adverse belief (such as about the economy). Experiences will follow. It is our ideals that should be planted firmly within our mind. These are the images we want thrust out into reality. Focusing on anything other than our ideals is a waste of energy.

STAY OUT OF THE SAND TRAPS: MOVE TO IDEALS

Those who forfeit the ideal for the sake of the path go nowhere slowly. Those who put aside the path for the sake of ideal go everywhere instantly.

Sand traps in golf are obstacles encountered on the way to the green. They are those beastly sandy beach areas strategically placed to snag your ball as you approach the green. Sand traps are not easy to swing out of. Each improper hit contains a threat to bury the ball further into the sand. The goal in golf is to avoid the traps by firmly fixing your eye on the green. Your focus, your aim and your hit are kept on the target not the traps. It is quite common to hear golfers say, “Don’t look at the trap. Pretend it’s not there.”

Like the sand traps of a well-orchestrated golf course, life has its own set of sand traps. These present themselves as obstacles in your path to success, abundance, joy and harmony. Your sand traps could be money obstacles, lack of know-how or necessary man power, lack of ideas, or not enough time. Anything can be a sand trap if you allow it to get between you and your ideal.

When your eye is fixed on the sand trap as you take aim in golf, you will land in the trap because your ball goes where your eye looks. The key to avoiding the trap is to look squarely beyond it at the target. Accordingly, your focus had better remain fixed beyond your traps and squarely on your ideal.

You must put aside the personal obstacles you perceive. Any time you catch yourself extending thoughts to the problems associated in reaching your ideal, instead of the ideal itself, you are in a trap. Commonly people get caught in the money trap. They erroneously think they need money to get something: start a new business, get out of debt or seed an invention. Money is the sand trap of every ideal.

Your thoughts are the producers of your minds ideals not money. As long as you hold tightly to your ideal the means will present. Successful people keep their ideals always finely focused on the outcome. It is not the means to achieving the ideal that consumes their thought. It is the Ideal itself. Unleashing your energy on your ideal ensures absolutely that you will get it.

Do not succumb to the temptation to list your reasons for not achieving your ideal as though they are facts. Your reasons are your traps. Release yourself from their captivity. Get yourself out of your mind traps by looking towards your ideal.

In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to devote their time to a search engine that would organize every bit of information on the web for FREE! This little search engine they donned with the name Google. Neither Brin nor Page at the time Google was being born knew how to make a free search engine profitable. However, that did not stop them. Nor did it stop some very early investors who also saw the insurmountable benefits in Google, but who also were not quite sure how money could be made from something offered for free. Instead of focusing on the profitability of Google, Brin and Page charged forward focusing on Google’s performance as an optimal search engine. The money eventually followed.

Had Brin and Page focused on making Google profitable (money trap) early on instead of focusing on their ideal which was creating a top performing search engine, Google likely would have ended up on the scrap pile of bad ideas. Google’s profitability revealed itself only through optimizing its search engine capabilities, as Brin and Page originally set out to do. They focused on their ideal. In doing so the way in which Google could be made profitable revealed itself.

When your focus is on the problem, then it is the problem that is drawn near. Focusing on the ideal draws forth solutions. Problems iron themselves out. They have to because problems are not part of the ideal. When you find yourself obsessing over how to or you use words like impossible, I can’t see how, it is not going to work; you have your eye directly on a problem and until you alter your focus you will not see the way.

You cannot think of contrasting thoughts concurrently. Remember how impossible it felt trying to think of multiple thoughts: your grocery list and a conversation you had. You cannot do it. When your mind is consumed with a problem, the solution is barred entry. Conversely, when your mind is wrapped tightly around your ideal, less than ideal thoughts are shut out. By holding your ideal and shutting out what is less than ideal, your ideal is the only experience that can form. Do you realize the power contained by holding your ideals firmly in your mind? They must migrate to you. There is no other option.

#35 YOUR IDEALS, OTHER PEOPLE & YOUR FEARS

2011-10-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

Value your own opinion more and others' opinions less. ~ Jonathan Lockwood Huie

A conversation on your ideals would not be complete without mentioning the onslaught of influence we allow others to prod us with. Too often we allow other people to manipulate our ideals. We accept their interpretations of our limits gladly rather than face ridicule. We let them convince us of some fictitious inability we have that prevents us from achieving our aspirations, as if they can stir truth into our abilities.

The people present in your life right now reside on a particular frequency; the same frequency as you. You are magnetically linked to these people. As you have energy flowing from you, so too, do they. As your thoughts become more constructive and your frequency begins to change, your acquaintances will launch a counterattack to return you to their view of what is a normal. The intention of the attack is to restore the frequency between your thinking and theirs. Doubt is the arsenal they launch to restore that order. Much like the role doubt plays in restoring order within you.

Understand that people are at different levels of enrichment. Frequencies differ. As you leave a frequency, you will leave certain people. As you enter a new frequency, you will encounter new people with ideals more in line with the fresh new you. Your ideals that were rejected by those on a negative frequency will be embraced by those on your new frequency. You then feel validated moving closer to your ideal. You have likely heard of the expression “climbing the ladder of success.” You can think of that ladder as having people associated on each rung. As you move up a rung, those on the old rung will repel some of your newly forming beliefs, while those on the new rung will embrace you.

People can serve as great validators of your ideals when you connect with the right people. Consider for simplicity that life’s success ladder has ten rungs. Sharing your level three rung beliefs and ideas with a level two rung friend will result in a rejection of your ideas by that friend. Conversely, a level three or level four rung associate would encourage and support you.

Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.
~ Oprah Winfrey

When someone rejects your ideals, your ideas, your thoughts and beliefs it is only because their thoughts and beliefs differ from yours. They are blissfully content to live amongst barriers. Recognize these barriers presently in them, but do not take ownership of them.

The phrase, that is not realistic, ought to be bounced from our vocabulary. After all, no one can determine what you are willing to make real. Furthermore, why would you take the advice of someone who has never tried? An expert non-trier! If we took the advice of every nay-sayer and dream killer out there we would not have telephones, computers, airplanes or railroads. Company’s like Federal Express, Mary K. Cosmetics, Google, and Microsoft would not exist. In fact, we would still be riding horses, retrieving our food from root cellars and receiving our mail from the pony express. Thankfully, nay-sayers are not able to sidestep everyone. But how many have they stopped? How many more contributions might exist?

Often our own doubt allows the rejection of others to trump our ideals. People will tell us we are being unrealistic or expecting too much. However, we do not have to wear their doubt. It belongs to them and as far as we should be concerned, they can keep it. Never take ownership of another person’s doubt. Just because they are not in a place of readiness does not mean you need reside there with them. Reach down and pull them up from their blinded existence if you must, but do no join them.

The greatest form of ignorance is forming an opinion about that which we know nothing about.

You should interpret your ideals according to your desires, not on behalf of the barriers to someone else’s thoughts. Define exactly what it is you want for the uninhibited you and go for it. As for other people? Do not live your life according to their beliefs. Live your life according to yours!

#34 CREATING YOUR IDEALS

2011-10-17T04:36:00.000-07:00

When asked if there is anything worse than not being able to see, Helen Keller said, “To be able to see and have no vision.”

Your ideal is the end result. It is not the route there. Do not confuse the two. Grasping this is yet another piece of the knowledge required to get you from here to there. We often make the mistake of focusing on the route. “How to” limits our choices to the confines of our current beliefs and keeps us always en route, never there. Ideals are created through deliberate concentrated effort on the end result. Ideals draw upon the imagination of spontaneous active thought which brew the seeds of new beliefs. Idealizing forces you to be imaginative, to step outside of your beliefs, and to think for a moment about what appeals to you.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. ~Lao Tzu (600 BC)

You are not to think of impossibilities, limits, practicalities or probabilities. Be unrealistic! Be impossible, improbable and illogical! You are to define only the ideal you! You without limits. You without reservations. Once you have done that, hold the vision. The path will unfold. There are only a couple of rules to follow. First, you cannot express what you do not want. You must define what you do want. Second, you must be crystal clear in defining your ideals. Ambiguity returns more ambiguity. If you are not willing to ask of yourself exactly what you want, why should you be provided with it? If you do not know what you want, then how do you expect to receive it? The Universal Mind rewards the specific concentrated thoughts of the faithful not the wishful thinking of the non-believers.

The hardest task will be defining you. You will be tempted to say: I want this negative situation removed. I want to live debt free. I want to be in better health. I want to lose weight. I want problems to go away. I want my car fixed, a better job, more money, joy, happiness, and abundance. Understand within each of these is the sprout of your current situation. When you try to interpret your ideal through the perspective of your current viewing angle it is always with a restricted vision of you. You are not bound by the limits that you currently perceive. The only way to forge a path through your beliefs is to focus on what you want, not what exists now or what you do not want.

In creating your ideals, be certain you know the reason for the ideal. Reason’s give your feelings a target. For example, what purpose does your dream house fill? What need in you are you intending to fulfill? Do you want a six bedroom house so you can clean more or entertain more? How does entertaining guests make you feel? Get in touch with the feelings associated with the reasons. Feelings guide your thoughts.

You are here. You want to be there. However, being there does not seem possible to you or you would be there. Your current beliefs make your ideal seem unbelievable forcing you to abandon your ideals in disbelief. Any attempts at using the words I want, admits your focus is on what you lack. Forget about your current situation. Forget about what you do not have but want. Define you much like an artist paints a canvas, according to a vision not through the perspective of what you do not have. Never say I want say I am. I am validates you. I want validates the continued desire for something you do not have.

Instead of looking at your future through the eyes of today, examine your future as though it is today! You have to believe and live as though you have arrived. If you are living your ideal right now, what are you doing? Where are you? Who do you know? How are you spending your day? What feelings are you experiencing? What brings those feelings about? What does your house look like? Is your car red? Are you married or single? What is your vision of the ideal mate? How are you using your creativity? Are you writing? Sky diving? Snorkeling in the Bahamas? Focusing on a vision of you puts the attention on the vision. The lack, then, is not noticed. That is how you mold the perception of you into your vision of you.

Once again it is easy to say, “How can I act abundant when I lack so much? I am not wealthy. My car is not a Rolls Royce. It is a rusted out winter beater. How can I act abundant when I feel financial constraints?” Physical labor is easy compared to mental application. That is why so many of us end up laboring physically; because mental work takes much greater effort. Your attention should be focused on feeling grateful for what you have. You should appreciate and find reasons to feel good about your car, your job or your life. If you are not grateful for what you have, how will more help you? Your car is a Rolls Royce to somehow who has no vehicle at all. What is your viewing angle? How do you see what you have? You see what you believe and you believe what you see. Look for your abundance. Practice gratitude. Recall in the beginning I said harmonious thinking is the payment for a harmonious life style.

It does not take money or possessions to change one’s life; it takes flamboyance to act out your ideal vision of you. If you feel mentally blocked, it is because you are creating the path instead of the ideal. You are allowing impossibilities to exist within your thinking. It is only difficult to imagine when you stymie your imagination. We feel stuck when you try to solve the problem. The solution is realized by focusing on the ideal state not present problems.

At first, all you might notice is that the current situation still exists. Your current experience will hold steadfast and true until its power source is zapped. It is solidified in your predominant thoughts and beliefs. It has been built up and now needs to be torn down. It will erode though through the down pour of your consistent thought concentrated on the ideal. In the words of Winston Churchill, “Never, never, never, never give up.”

#33 IDEALS, UNCERTAINTY AND PROBLEMS THAT ARISE

2011-10-15T17:14:00.000-07:00

We are not accustomed to thinking in terms of ideals since our erratic thinking has brought less then ideal circumstances. Consequently, we have not learned to think our way to our ideal and so falsely believe that we must settle for what is less than ideal. We often fall back upon our Ben Franklin lists of pros and cons whilst we try to imagine the best possible outcome or the worst possible scenario.

It is only because we are used to thinking in terms of best solutions or hopeful outcomes, that painting the ideal picture in our mind does not occur to us. We never imagine the ideal. It is excluded from our thoughts. Since we fail to properly construct our ideals within our mind, it never arrives. If you do not know where you are going then any thought will do.

Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

For example, as your bills pile up, your car breaks down, and your house payment is past due, what do you focus on? These problems, right? They transfix you. You hope your car is not too expensive to fix. You think it might be the transmission, but hope it is something less. You mull over ways to get caught up on your bills by considering which bills to address first and which you can afford to be late on. You wonder how many days late you can be on your house payment before it adversely affects your credit. If your health is poor or your weight is tipping the scales, your thoughts cycle around poor health. You contemplate how your health can be fixed; exercise and diet…but that sounds so restrictive. These thoughts are typical of what we all do. It is called “in a rut thinking.”

By focusing on these problems, more problems are drawn to you. You will always encounter problems, obstacles, hurdles, and paths of uncertainty as you embark upon destructive thinking. Destructive thought attracts like experiences.

You must always start with the end in mind. What is it that you really want? Confusion and discontent are opportunities to idealize for the inner psyche your perfect state. Often we expect the worst and hope for the best. But that is far from ideal. In fact, that sort of thinking displays complete misunderstanding and misdirection of your personal power. It is also a blatant example of polar thinking when thoughts are excessively lent to both ends of the spectrum. A blending of your thoughts causes your strongest beliefs to emerge quite often ending in a stalemate. Again, this is not ideal.

Do not confuse your ideal outcome for the best case scenario either. They are NOT the same. We hold many belief barriers in our thinking that limit our choices to what we think is a possibility, disregarding everything that we feel is improbable. When you idealize, you clarify for yourself the exact outcome you intend. You do not toss improbabilities or what you deem are impossibilities on the scrap pile. Impossible feats are accomplished only when you believe in them. In 1886 traveling to the moon was a laughable impossibility. At the turn of the century, Henry Ford was told it was very, very improbable that people would want any other color car than black. And a computer in every home in America, not a very likely scenario in 1942!

The path to the ideal is through thoughts of the ideal. Always ask yourself when presented with situations, “If this were to end in the absolute ideal situation for me, what would that be?” The only way to get the optimal experience is to think of exactly what it is you want! Allow the thoughts to permeate the conscious mind.

If you are unsure what to do in the midst of turmoil, always start with your ideals. Starting with your ideal, clarifies with certainty the outcome you expect. Your ideals should not contain compromises! After all, this is your absolute ideal state. Think of it as your own personal utopia. You get to say what resides in your utopia.

Your life plan should contain ideals that do not sell short your dreams. Playing the guitar on weekends down at the corner bar is not an adequate substitute to being in a world famous band. Do you want to play guitar at the corner bar or at Angels Stadium? Both are choices available to you. What is your life’s vision? If it does not include financial despair, a boring job and thunder thighs, then what does it include? You must be willing to purify for yourself what your intentions are. If you do not, your life will be handed to you on the platter of random thought.

If you were not restricted what would you do? Answering this question causes you to think in turns of ideals. Most people have a rapid ready answer to this question. The restrictions that you think you have are self-created illusions that center round an apparent lack of something you think you do not have, but think you need in order to move forward. However, you are free to create the world you desire. The restrictions that you sense are really only thoughts blocking the path. There is nothing physical blocking you. After all, you can take immediate action towards your ideals right now without being physically obstructed. The block is mental and fortunately removable.

In certain areas you might allow your ideals to emerge like concentrating on the ideal mate. But you may have a harder time allowing ideals when considering your personal financial situation or job opportunities. For example, your beliefs may prevent you from idealizing financials goals because you believe it is unrealistic to think or to expect your bills to go away. So instead of thinking in terms of ideal outcome, you concentrate on best case scenario and work within the limited parameters of your beliefs. You experience outcomes in this case that are believable outcomes and deny those that seem unbelievable.

Understand that impossibilities exist nowhere but in the belief framework of your mind. If you free your thinking from restrictive barriers, all sorts of possibilities exist to wipe out bills. It is only because you have permitted so few solutions for relief to funnel through that you remain stationary with a pile of bills.

Once again it might be tempting to point to your pile of bills as proof of your financial position, but recall you created that position through thought and you hold it steady through your beliefs. However, you can recreate it too. Bills, excess weight, or unhappiness with current conditions will not go away when you do not believe in ideal outcomes. Optimism does not equal Idealism. The Universal Mind is not a wish granter. It is a reflector of your beliefs.

If you have been waiting for permission to idealize, then consider it granted. As you encounter problems, always start by asking yourself, what do I want to occur if virtually anything could? Once you have that answer focus on it intently. Validate the outcome in your mind so a belief can form that: Yes, this is possible for me.

Power is concentration. What you concentrate intensely on, is intense power. Use ideals to solve many of your daily dilemmas, just by asking what is ideal. Then allow your thoughts to flow freely around that ideal. They will mold and shape that unrestricted ideal into exactly what you have requested. You must believe!