Be Your Own Fairy Godmother

Diamond Star by Catherine Asaro

Catherine Asaro’s latest, Diamond Star is a fast-paced adventure that sets the microcosm of star-maker machinery in the music industry against the macrocosm of interstellar intrigue. It’s also a look at both allowing your dream and making it come true. Even if you are not into science fiction, you’ll like the Earth-y romance and setting of this book.

The main character, Del Arden, is a mix of Prince Harry, Luke Skywalker, Elvis, and Sarah Boyle. His quest to live his dream of singing his music leads him further into the political strife he is trying to escape, while his personal life is tangled up with sex, lies, and virtual reality. At first he must hide his identity, but the truth will always out.

Asaro’s handling of personal relationships gives the story depth and texture, not just the love interest, but of Del’s conflicts with his royal family, his manager, his producer, Earth security forces, and the members of the band. Del’s struggle is not to find himself, but to be himself, and to own his value as a person living in unique circumstances of birth, challenge, and opportunity. Even a prince has a price to pay to be himself.

Asaro’s extrapolations of custom nanotechnology and the current social networking scene balance the high fantasy aspects of the story, making it great fun for fantasy and science fiction readers alike. While there are a large number of books set in this universe, this one stands by itself. Once you discover Asaro, you will want to read more.

Do get the rock opera on CD or itunes to go along with the book, but failing that, listen the greatest hits of classic hard rock while you are reading. It’s like being in your own rock video.

And read this book with the idea of allowing your own dream to come true despite all odds.

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Young children do not have a clear understanding of the difference between telling the truth, making up a story, and telling a lie. Their imagination is very powerful, and sometimes they just want to make the story more exciting, a kind of artistic license. Parents use euphemisms to excuse that behavior: fibbing, telling a white lie, or telling a story.

The power of telling a story is that whatever story you tell yourself over and over becomes your belief system, your reality. Have you ever rehearsed an excuse for being late, for getting out of a date, for not getting a project done on time? You were telling a story, one that was not true.

What about our stories that tell ourselves? We often say “I’m too tired” when the truth is “I don’t want to do it.” We may make up stories like “Nobody likes me” or “I’m not good at math” or “Everyone else does it.”

Psychologists call this self-talk, and one of my therapists pointed out to me that if I was going to talk to myself, then I’d better pay attention to what I was saying.

If you want to make your wish come true, change your stories. Tell yourself good stories, and don’t add “but I could never do that” to the end. Tell yourself stories about times you were successful. Tell yourself stories about how you are having a great day, even though it’s raining, the air conditioning is too cold, and the person on the phone is rude and uncooperative.

When someone asks you how you are today, tell them you are “wonderful” and smile. When you run into a computer glitch, instead of getting upset, say to yourself “I can fix this. I’ll be patient.” Take a moment to breathe, to return to your body, to stretch and refocus your eyes further away.

Any time you find yourself running your same story over and over in your mind, whether it’s remembering something that happened in the past, or worrying about something that might happen in the future, STOP.

Start
Thinking
On the
Positive.

Take a moment to look around you and be present where you are. Even if you are in an emergency situation, which you probably aren’t if you are reading this, it helps to pay attention to what is going on right now. Don’t get caught up in a story of panic.

Be present. You can’t change the past, although you can work on releasing the pain of it. You can’t live in the future, though you can plan for success.

Stop telling yourself stories that hurt, and work on stories that build you up to live in the present. For example, how much better would your life be if you told yourself that you were always in the right place, at the right time, with the right words to say to the right person in the right way.

If you are going to tell a story, use the imaginative power of the child, and make it a good one.

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A reader wrote, “I am not magical.”  Yes, you are!

Magic is another name for faith without all the grape juice and crackers. Magic is believing in yourself and acting as though you could do whatever you wish to do, by preparing, by working hard now to prepare for  the day when you do get your wish.

It’s about doing whatever part of your wish you can do today…training your mind, your body, your spirit, your hands, your feet to do what they need to do. It’s about changing your self-limiting perspective on life to begin to see the opportunities that do exist for you.

If you have not seen the video of Susan Boyle on Youtube, go there now see magic in action. Susan is 47, frumpy with a grandmother hair do and eyebrows that have never been plucked. She went to the British version of American Idol in what looked like a church dress. The judges were openly contemptuous of her. and the audience smirked at their collective “Aunt Susan” who probably sings in the choir at church with one of those really warbly bird voices.

But when she opened her heart and began to sing, they were amazed. The blonde, barbie-doll-type judge actually had tears in her eyes. Susan has a wonderful voice, and has obviously learned to use it–you can’t sing like that without practice and training. She also knew how to sing the song and what song to sing: “I dreamed a dream.” She may have even planned the surprise by not dressing in an eveing gown or stage dress. As she walked off the stage, excited by the “Biggest Yes in the History of the Show”, she blew a kiss to the audience who were standing and cheering for her.

That is magic. That is believing in yourself. That is knowing who you are. And that is making your  your wish come true.

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Every change we make in our lives causes stress, whether it’s a positive, greatly anticipated change or a sudden and undesirable change. Any stressor that we may overlook in our manifesting work is that new skills take time to develop.We can’t expect to have expert results after the first three attempts.

One of my dear friends will hardly ever try a new task because she won’t take the time to develop the skills to do the task at the level she admires.She gets so frustrated that her watercolors are not the sparkling masterpieces she sees in the artist magazines, and her Chinese calligraphy is not as good as the beautiful calligraphy she does in English.  It takes time, and it takes using materials, and it takes not having stellar results at first.

Today I got a good lesson from Aweber.com in how to set up a blog broadcast. I’m not sure what happened back in November to make the blog posts stop broadcasting, maybe even something I did. But today I managed to send out four empty posts without even a link back to the site–not only to my list but to twitter as well. sigh. That’s called learning.

Ah, well, I’m learning, and I’m working at making my wish come true, to understand and be able to work the internet to market my writing and promote my clients. One day at a time, and keep on keeping one–that’s the ticket.

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Mark David Gerson understands love. Love is only patient and kind on your end–if you love, you develop patience and kindness to deal with the changes that love brings.

Love is not about happy, shiny, fluffy–that is about sex, even if it’s not a sexual love. Love is about being willing to give to the loved one even after there is no more to give, and sometimes it is about saying no when every drop of your soul wants to say yes.

Coming to peace with the challenge of love is what changes your life.  Love is a harsh mistress, but she brings the strength to do what cannot be done otherwise.

He says it better, and more cheerfully,  than I do. Read his blog post here: http://markdavidgerson.blogspot.com/2009/03/love-changes-everything.html

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Poof!  Or Process?

When we make a wish, we want it to appear immediately: POOF! After all, that’s what happens on TV and in movies when there is magic.

That is not how magic, or manifesting, works in the real world, even though sometimes it looks that way.

J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel was rejected a dozen times before being accepted for publication—and she only got a $3000 advance when it was accepted. Roberta Flack became an overnight success with her song “Killing Me Softly” after playing and singing for ten years. Read the biography of any person who has achieved great success, and you will find a story of overcoming obstacles, both before and after they became successful.

What magic requires is a strong, clear picture of what we want, and clearing out all our resistances and doubts about getting it. Then it requires that we do all we can on our end,  Rowling wrote, and wrote and wrote, plotting out the entire series of seven books. Flack attended Howard University at age 15, in piano and voice, graduated at 19 to teach music in junior high school, and performed on the weekends, only to be discovered at age 31.

My mother’s favorite aphorism is “All things come to those who wait, if they work while they are waiting.”  But both the wish—or dream—and the work are necessary. If we only work with no goal, or if we only wish with no effort, nothing happens.

Participating in the process, doing the daily diligence with the dream in mind is how magic works.  Often just when it seems that nothing will ever come of the work, everything falls into place, and POOF happens.  We have to be ready when all the ducks line themselves up.

We have to know who we are and what we want, and we have to do the work.  The Universe provides the magic.

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Mike Dooley’s Notes from the Universe usually brightens my day but day before yesterday, the wording confused me until I had a talk with my  lifecoach Patti Lee Thomas .  What “The Universe” said was:

If you look closely enough, intent upon understanding those things that cause you great pain and consternation, Charlotte, ultimately, I promise you, you’ll find great joy and illumination.

And if you look closer still, Charlotte, you’ll see all such things as proof of life’s infinite grace.
–the Universe (as channeled by Mike Dooley )

Now I did see that as uplifting, but what I heard from this was “Crawl inside the pain and see what’s there.”  That was my negative training, that something is always broken and must be fixed. That there must be some analysis and focus on the pain and consternation. I was willing to see that something that upset me might have a purpose, or it might even have a happy thought hidden in the compost, like a seed for a flower.

It took Patti Lee two emails and a face to face chat to show me where I was tripping up.

I wasn’t looking for the joy. I could be outside the event and look at a wider picture, and look only for the joy and illumination, not for the other stuff that might be there.

Looking for joy does not involve crawling on your hands and knees, groveling or slithering through some emotional or physical crap. It involves LOOKING.  With my mind.

Patti Lee calls it “detached compassion.”  You can’t have compassion for something you can’t see. So you look at it, without judgment, without assumptions, without emotional baggage. You take yourself out of the situation and see what is going on, as if you are watching it on TV happening to a fictional character.

This is not so hard if you do it after the fact, and it is the memory that needs to be detached anyway. Most of our vibrational damage is done by replaying memories and overlaying them with “That always happens to me”  in four-part harmony with subsonic bass in technicolor. We do this because we get another rush of adrenaline laced with self-pity from the memory, and that keeps us from doing anything differently. No matter how much an event happened through no fault of our own, we can choose how we look at it, and how we respond to it.  We can change what we believe about it. That is how to find the joy.

Joy is in the release of the old, negative thoughts and habits that we have used for so long that they are now our beliefs.

What Patti Lee finally got through to me, and even that information lightened my vibration, was that being emotionally detached from the issue allows me to SEE what it is. I can look at it without getting upset. When I can do that, I can see what is going on without having emotional reaction.  I also don’t get an adrenaline rush that tires me out and takes my energy away from my tasks for the day.

I don’t have to get upset if I think of something that is outside of what I expect.  Patti Lee has learned to say, “How curious” rather than offering a value judgment. She has taught herself to believe that she can look for joy in every moment. She has thought a thought of curiosity instead of judgment enough times that she has changed her old belief that it was beneficial for her to judge events. She has changed her belief that a negative reaction was beneficial or even necessary, much less unavoidable.

For example, if traffic is heavy, and I can’t get into the lane to make a turn, I can go a different way even if it is longer. I can be calm and make another plan. And I can do it without having to think about the Universe taking the time to poke me with some kind of karmic “I told you so.”  A loving Universe-God(dess)-Inner Being does not do that.

We do that kind of thing to ourselves, but we can stop. We can look for Joy. If we remind ourselves in every moment that joy is our aim and our plan for making our wishes come true, we can come to believe it.

And along the way we become joyous.

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You must have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?

- “Happy Talk” from  South Pacific

Carol Look’s EFT Newsletter (#80) has a a wonderful article in her today about offering a clear vibration. Witnout a clear picture of what you want and a clear vibration in your being that resonates with your wish, you won’t get what you want, or you will get it mixed with other things you don’t want.  Being clear on what you want is important to making your wish come true.

She asks some questions to help us thing about why we might be confused or conflicted:

1. Are there any downsides to being clear about what you want? Are you secretly afraid of getting your wish?
2. Are there social, family or emotional risks to being clear about your wish? Who would be upset if your life changed?
3. What are the benefits to being fuzzy or unfocused?  Does it seem like too much work to get clear?
4. What makes clarity feel unsafe? If you really knew what you have asked for, would you really want it?

Then she offers an EFT protocol for releasing the emotional blocks to clarity.  EFT is the quickest and simplest way I have found to release resistance and raise my vibration, and I like Carol Look’s protocols because she not only addresses the negative thoughts, but she also replaces them at the end of the protocol with positive affirmations.EFT involved tapping lightly on your face and hands while you say simple phrases. The action of tapping on these energy meridians helps your body release the emotional glitches that you may have, which allows your mind and body to synchronize in the present.

Many of the activities recommended in my blog are for the purpose of getting a clear vision of what your wish includes, how it will make you feel, how you feel now, and even uncovering blocks that may keep your wish from coming to your front door.

In addition to her free newsletter ( I recommend that you sign up today!) , she has a weight loss program, a pain relief program and an abundance program, which seem to be the three most popular wishes. Visit her today  at attractingabundance.com

Transparency: I am an affiliate. I am clear that what she offers is good for you and me.

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One of my co-workers is never happy. No matter what event happens in her life, she is not pleased.  If she has a happy thought, she always adds a negative thought to slap it down.

We are having a Biggest Loser contest at the office, and she is on my team. She says, “I lost five pounds this week, but it will probably come back after the contest is over.”  She thinks that she is being humorous by laughing at herself, but from my perspective, her chuckles are like sighs of pain and despair: “ha ha this is just my miserable life. I’m used to it. It will never change.” She is stuck because she won’t try to look at things in a different way.

This kind of self-deprecating humor is not designed to make light of problems or keep us from taking ourselves seriously. In fact, it does the opposite by diminishing any thought or vibration that might lift us up. It’s sometimes called being “realistic.”  It is a self-fulfilling prophecy–like wishing for more bad luck. That wish is always granted.

This habitual unhappiness not only attracts more unhappiness, but it also guarantees that we won’t see or accept happy thoughts or events even when they do happen–a vicious downward cycle. Thinking happy thoughts is uncomfortable, unfamiliar.  Raising your vibration to think happy thoughts takes more effort than “the devil you know.”  In the Christian perspective, the Devil is exactly those negative thoughts, those lies we tell ourselves to relieve any anxiety about taking action to change our thinking or our actions to better ourselves. Being honest with ourselves means taking the GOOD with the bad, and taking the necessary action to make good decisions.

I recently learned that I have cataracts in both eyes, one that is noticeably affecting my vision. I am not happy about that. But the good news is that with my new job, I have insurance to help pay for the surgery to take care of my eyes, and the newer surgical techniques may actually allow me to see better than I did before.  I am happy about those facts. Rather than spending time and energy telling everyone about my eyes and how terrible it is, I have called the doctor and the HR person to find out what I can do next. I am taking action to get  more information to make a good decision about what to do. I have choices.

I am learning to come to peace with what happens, and my co-worker is a wonderful teacher for me.  I know that anyone that I find irritating does the same things that I do that I don’t like in myself–she is what Jung calls my “shadow.” I can get stuck in unhappiness, or I can change my perspective so that I can respond to the situation.

She reminds me daily–sometimes hourly–that I have the ability to choose to be happy despite events, and that if I am stuck in my own muddy thoughts, it’s up to me to get unstuck.

Are you stuck? What thoughts are keeping you there? What are you going to do about it?

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At first when you start working towards manifesting, you are excited and pleased that it is going to be so easy, that it is finally going to happen, that you are in control of your life.   Then something happens, and it all seems so far away.

That’s a Dark Day.  That’s when you can’t find any hope, when you seem to have made so little progress and when the forces of the Dark Side seems to be in control yet again.

Your habits carry you through the Dark Days. The new things you are doing that are the parts of your dream you can do today wll sustain you. You’ve been following your new eating plan. Don’t get a Dark Day stop you, or if you lost sight of the goal and found yourself up to your nose in unhealthy food in front of the TV, forgive yourself and go back to your better plan.

Look at your journal–you are keeping one, right? When did you have your last Dark Day? Did something happen to cause it? Are you letting outside events change your wish? Are you feeding yourself healthy thoughts along with your new routines?

Consider adding some inspirational reading to your day, early in the morning, during lunch, or just before you go to bed–the timing is less important than being sure to add some good thoughts.  One way to start the habit of a journal is to copy down inspirational thoughts–Abraham-Hicks has a thought-for-the-day email service, as does Mike Dooley with his Notes from the Universe.

There are lots of daily inspirational calendars and magazines, and you could always read from your sacred text such as the Bible or the Koran.  At the very least, you can write a list of five different things that you are thankful for–your life, your ability to write, your safe trip home from work, electricity and running water,  a roof over your head, even if it isn’t yours.

Remember to breathe, both in deeply and out completely. Deep rhythmic breathing is aerobic even without the exercise. It allows you to calm your mind and get your energy back into your body where you can use it.

Every bright day is followed by a dark night. It is the rhythm of life.  If it seems dark during the day because it is raining or cloudy or because you are in a smog of old thoughts, remember that is part of the rhythm too.  Keep on keeping the vision, and the Dark Days will pass.  You will be stronger for staying with your new habits and your strong vision for the future.

Every hero has to face obstacles that seem insurmountable. But each one has the inner strength to try because of his or her goal.  So do  you.

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