This is important because you are contributing to the sum and exponential growth of the universe, at least according to the teachers called Abraham, channeled by Esther Hicks. Your desire for any feeling causes the universe to expand, and to the extent that you desire to feel good, and keep yourself in that vibration, the universe responds by bringing you what you want. Of course, by universal law, the universe brings you whatever you focus on, regardless of how you feel, so that if you focus on pain, frustration, anger, jealousy, injustice or whatever else, you get more of that.

Mike Dooley, who channels The Universe, says much the same thing: Thoughts become things. Choose good ones.

What you want, also wants you. Being selfish in the sense of choosing that which pleases you, doing that which makes you feel good, nurturing yourself adds immeasurably to the joy, happiness, peace and overall goodness of the universe.

Even though people do suffer and endure pain and give up their lives for others, they choose to do this out of a sense of rightness, of “it’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.” People who give generously often speak of wanting to give back, which makes them feel good.

So, in your unique way, you expand the universe by being yourself, by desiring what you want, by making your choices and by dreaming your perfect life. No one else can do this for you, and your contribution is unique and sacred.

Stop, breathe, and find a good-feeling thought. Then allow yourself to be that unique gift back to the universe simply by being you.

I’ve had a down week this week, and I’ve found myself backsliding on a number of issues, making poor food  choices, letting myself get frustrated about minor things, and just not staying on my chosen path.

I’ve not even been talking the talk, except in my blog, which is based on the A to Z challenge. The challenge is good for me, as I have been writing every morning, but talk is cheap. If I’m not walking the walk, the talk is a lie.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve neglected some of my affirmations and inspirational reading this past week, and not feeding the mind with good stuff seems to lead to my feeding the body with bad stuff.

Talking the talk is important to walking the walk. I need to keep my mind focused on what I DO want, and not to pay attention to what I don’t want. I know how to shift my attention to the positive side and how to distract myself from the negative. It’s a matter of finding something else to think about–cleaning out a drawer, taking a walk in a park, even falling down a rabbit hole on the internet can take my mind away from the squirrel cage.

Making a list of positive aspects of any situation helps as well, by forcing me to think of what is good, what the parts are that I don’t like and what I can do about it. Most things that frustrate me are not even my problems, but just something that I must deal with. To the extent that I can see that something is not mine to fix, I can go back to that big stack of stuff that is mine to fix.

Talking the talk to myself is important, too. I need to remind myself that I’m doing good work. That I love myself. That everyone else is having challenges to day too, and that being open and flexible about their schedules will benefit us all.

So, today I am talking the talk, and walking the walk. It’s going to be a great day, and I am looking for the joy and delight of living it. I hope you are too.

Nobody ever had a perfect past. Nobody. How would we learn anything if we did not have challenges, disappointments, failures and roadblocks, as well as successes, victories, and top-of-the-mountain experiences?

So while in grammar, there’s a past perfect, that only means the action is over, done with, and gone, perfected only in that it is already complete.

You can’t change the past. You can be upset about it. you can base your present moment on it, and you can let it color your future.

You can look at it differently.

Various techniques help to release the emotional energy stuck in the memories of the past. Emotional Freedom Technique, EFT, also known as tapping, helps to separate the trauma from the event, so that it is just a memory, not a constant, emotional state of mind. Without removing the emotion, the event is part of your filter through which you see life. When that filter is altered, your perception, and therefore, your reality changes.

Without changing your thoughts, your present and your future cannot be what you want it to be. If you are always afraid, you won’t be able to do what you need to do to succeed. If you think you are a victim, you will find ways to attract victimizers. If you luxuriate in righteous indignation, you’ll find ways and reasons to stay angry and not do anything about the situation, bringing yourself immune-system damage, loss of mental capacity, and stress fatigue.

Of course, all this drama has a payoff: if you are incapable of taking action because you are too tired or too sick, you are “off the hook.” Your future becomes more and more conditional, as in, you can look forward to less and less future, less and less quality of life.

So, accept that the past was perfet. It is completed, and it has given you the present, the gift of who you are with your current skills and strengths. The present is now, the only time you have to do something about whatever you want to be, do or have. With a new perspective on the past, your future can unfold to your specifications.

The condition of your future depends on releasing the tension of the present. Relax into now. Be here. Think happy thoughts of what you desire, and allow the conditions of the future to rearrange themselves in your behalf.

You can learn to allow others to do what they want to do. Being upset by what other people do is common, even when the actions do not affect you in a personal way. For example, even watching horror or crime TV gets your emotional being upset, although you may enjoy the drama and suspense. You are choosing to put your attention on something that is not real, that is designed for your emotional arousal, and that takes your attention from what you want to what you don’t want.

Allowing is your choice, of course, to spend your time and attention on whatever pleases you. No one can tell you what to enjoy. But if you find that watching the news on TV gets you upset and angry, especially if it makes you feel small, helpless and frustrated, you are not allowing others to do what they feel is necessary, and your emotional vibration is turned away from what makes you feel good, what makes you feel empowered.

Allowing means to focus on what you want, and if it is to right the wrongs of the world, and to turn your attention to changing the injustices you see on TV, more power to you. What is important about allowing is that you don’t try to control others, especially others who are not minor children in your care. You allow them to have their own dreams, their own wishes and to be their own fairy godmothers, and you focus on what you are manifesting for yourself.

If we are all so unhappy, why don’t we do something about it? It’s not that hard to change what you think.

But it is hard to STOP.

Here’s the rub. Feeling happy is uncomfortable.  The happy vibration clashes with the vibration we have, like fingernails on a chalk board–or listening to Pachelbel’s Canon when you are expecting Radiohead. Imagine an old-school rapper being forced to listen to  Saint Saens, or vice versa.

It’s like a new pair of Birkenstocks. You have to wear them a while before they take on the shape of your feet. It takes a few days to break them in.  If you just jump on them and go on a ten-mile hike, you won’t make it.

Changing an emotional state is the same way. It takes effort to think new thoughts with positive messages and then NOT to follow them with cynical or sarcastic humor that just slaps us us back down where we are used to being.

You think, “I could win the lottery,”  raising your vibration to hope. But then you add, “I’d just have to hide out from everyone who wanted to get my money.”

That CLUNK sound is your vibration hitting bottom.

You dutifully write your affirmations:  I am debt free. I am healthy. I am thin…but with each stroke of the pen, you think about how much shorter than the month your paycheck is, or how thin people have to watch what they eat, or how hard it would be to exercise.

CLUNK.

Being unhappy is only comfortable because you are used to it. You practice it very hard every day.

If you worked at anything as hard as you work at being unhappy, you’d be the world’s leading expert. That big weight that holds you down and makes you tired when you get up in the morning is the chain of unhappiness you forged yesterday, and that you are forging every minute that you aren’t working to be postive.

Try for fifteen minutes, five minutes even,  to think a positive thought whenever you hear something unhappy.  Do you get stopped by the traffic light? Admire the glow of the red light.  Congratulate yourself for driving safely.  Take a deep breath and say, “I’m doing well today.”  Anything positive.

Every time you start to say “Yes, But…”, STOP.

Start
Talking
Only
Positive.

The old oak lets the other plants grow in its branches.

I heard my coworker complaining about one of our prospective students–one we probably don’t want. How hard it was to let her speak her truth and not try to change her mind. That her words irritated me shows me that I still want to fix other people.

That doesn’t work. It really doesn’t work when they don’t ask to be fixed, since they don’t see themselves as broken. That’s my perception.

Heal myself is all I can do.

Speak what I want. Think what I want. Meditate on what I want. Ask for what I want, and work while I am waiting for the answers to tell me what to do next. It’s so simple.

Not a big ritual with lots of drama. Not an unpronounceable incantation.  No fireworks or immolation or pain.  Simply changing my mind, at the right time, NOW.

It may not be my job to figure out how I can get what I want, what steps to take,  what jobs to do, because first I must believe, and imagine, and trust that what I want, wants me too.

No, that’s not very realistic.  But so far, realistic hasn’t done much for me. I do have to pay the bills and go in to work every day, at least for now, until I can see what the next step is.  I can be at peace where I am as I am working and waiting. After all, the job I have now is a cinch compared to others I have done.

It’s a manifestation along the way to have a full-time job with benefits doing work I like and learning new stuff every day. It’s a manifestation to find old pastimes boring and to be restless for writing and other creative activities. It’s a manifestation to see beauty in both sun and rain, wind and calm, weeds and flowers.

It hasn’t always been that way, but I am learning.  Think about what I want ONLY. Say what I want ONLY.  Find those rosy, optimistic glasses and put them over my mental filter.  I am more aware every day of the good things that come to me and how lucky I truly am.   The more aware I am, the more blessings come my way.

May you, too, blessed be.

Nixie waits patiently for Mom to get off the computer.

Maybe I am just getting old, but it seems that my cat and I both wake up at 3:30 or so every morning. She goes out, I go, and then I lie in the bed wishing myself back to sleep.

For the last couple of days, I’ve been writing instead. This is taking an action to be who I say I am, a writer.  After all, once you have a goal, and even part of a plan, then you have to take some kind of action, the next logical step. This alerts the Universe that you are shifting in your vibration. That’s what “be the change” means. At least 2 cents worth of it.

I’d rather be asleep, but I am here pecking away rather than half-dreaming about facebook and wordpress connections and figuring them out.  What I need today is  to find that peaceful place that says ” This too shall pass.”  It’s not like anything in my life is hard.  No earthquakes, no floods, no dings on my new car from the hailstorm yesterday, plenty of foodin the fridge, and I have a home, a warm bed, a cat…nothing here to complain about.

I’ll get the kinks smoothed out.  I was going to write “hammered” and then “ironed” but I am working on changing the language I use to be softer, less forceful and violent.  I want to think in ways that are more peaceful and to become less frustrated with learning new computer skills to translate human desires into digital content.

Change your thoughts, change your world.

It’s quiet and peaceful at 4 am.  The cat sits staring into the dark outside the window, and the turtle snoozes with his beak just breaking the water. I’m wrapped up in my afgan to stay warm in my nightgown.  I might even go back to bed for another hour, having written.  Maybe I’ll dream of the solution I am looking for,and maybe I won’t be so worried about it if it doesn’t come to me today.

Life is good.  Come on, cat. Let’s get another snooze in.

But I did find a lot of cobwebs on the bookcase and a number of thoughts about unfinished projects that were once dreams of mine. Cobwebs are easy to dust away, but what about those dreams?

At least one dream I had was to have a website for goddess seekers to use as a study and meditation guide. I did get it up and running, Find a Goddess, but I have never gotten the database update page working properly so that it is easy to add new information to the database or to update and edit the mistakes that were entered when I was learning how to design and display information.

I’ve talked to a few people–students mostly–about fixing the code, but they don’t want to mess with it. It’s hard to go in behind someone else and figure out the logic and why something is coded as it is. I’m sure it’s not coded with any style–it was a learning project.

I’ve taken time–several days at a time–to fix this project, which has been on the back burner some three or four years now. Every time I start to work on it, I just get frustrated and  overwhelmed. But I decided that if I could do all the rest of it myself, I could get that page fixed and then plan to spend a hour a week or so updating and making the site the kind of place I wanted it to be.

But today I decided that with the right attitude and some pre-paving, I could plan to tackle the project tomorrow. I’m visualizing feeling calm as I look through the various attempts I’ve made before. I have made some notes on how to think about the code, so that I am not designing and coding with the same synapses. I can write simple code (php/HTML) or I can be creative, but not both at the same time. So I did the design today, and I plan to code tomorrow.

I feel so much better about dusting off this project. I would eventually like to set it up to bring in a little money now and then, with some good affiliate programs or adwords, but I’d mainly like for it to work. I would feel that I’d done what I set out to do.

While it remains to be seen how well the project will go, I feel better by making a decision rather than pushing the thought away that I (AGAIN) have not completed something that was important to me, and that (AGAIN) I am not where I hoped to be by now.

It is okay to let a project go, too. I could even take it down and feel reasonably good about that. But I want to get it working like I envisioned it and learn more about how that works. I have always found that developing a skill pays off in the long run, even if it’s only a little and a little late.

I’ll do an update on this topic next week, but for now, I’m visualizing an updated database with new entries and corrections from the old ones.  Wish me luck! That’s what I’m wishing for myself.

I  whined grumpily that I was tired, and she said something brilliant.

“Why don’t you raise your vibration so we can keep working on this?  Then you can find out what you need to do today., and you’ll feel better.”

At moment, I could only think dark and cloudy thoughts. I didn’t want to do the work anymore, even though I had asked her to help me. I wanted to just give up and escape.

“Think of it this way,” she said. “If your mind was a machine, and there was a piece that was broken or worn out, you could just stop for a minute, take out the bad part and put in a new part.”

I could see it in my mind–a sort of grimy, greasy machine with a lot of gears, and a handle that I was having to push very hard to turn. When I stopped to look at the imaginary machine,  I could see that one piece was missing some cogs. I took it out–it was conveniently located at eye level and not constrained by serpentine belts, bearings or safety covers–and replaced it with a bright, shiny new one, which of course magically appeared in my hand.  It was a new thought.

Even that seemed like a lot of work, just imagining it. But I did feel better, just for thinking about something else for a few seconds.

Then Rachel told me how she could always find that feeling, any time she needed it. She said, “I just imagine flying…soaring around a thermal…” She stretched out her arms. ” or swooping around, not doing anything, no strings, not looking for food or doing anything but enjoying being in the air. ”  She once drew a picture of a happy harpy several years ago, and the image of it came into my mind.

The Happy Harpy By Rachel H. White

Just watching her was uplifting. My grumpiness was not completely gone, but it had lightened enough that I would at least imagine standing on top of a mountain or sitting up in a tree, always a place of peace and calm for me.

I can remember dreaming of flying. I decided that such a daydream would be a good one to cultivate and practice for when I was feeling weighted down.  So I’ve been spending a fem seconds every time I think about it , just imagining soaring in the sky, with the sun on my feathered back and the wind rippling the edges of my pinfeathers.

Try it. Soaring like the eagles beats the heck out of hanging out with the turkeys.

That depends on me  and what I do with the sensitivity. If I allow myself to focus on the things that irritate me, causing me to focus my awareness on them, the sensitivity becomes harmful, attracting more irritation. But I can shift my awareness–that’s the good thing. How many times  I have blocked out extraneous noises, a headache or toothache, or distracting or disturbing sights by focusing my awareness on my work, on doing something else.  By controlling my focus, my awareness, I have the capability of controlling my experience of whatever is going on around me.  In that sense, I am the center of my universe–at least from my perspective!

If the thing that irritates me–say a grain of sand in my shoe–is something I can fix, then the sensitivity brings it to my awareness so I can fix it. Then I can focus on something else. If I choose not to fix it, then it can become a larger problem–a blister or hole in my foot that is more difficult to ignore, and may even become health-threatening.

But if I notice that the irritation is something I can’t fix, I can learn to turn my focus to something soothing–music or natural sounds, the feel of  warm socks on myfeet, something pretty on my desk–I can work at becoming more sensitive to positive stimuli. Many of us take the pleasant for granted instead of seeking it out–it’s the whole smell the roses thing. Most people are very good at focusing to avoid awareness, but not shifting awareness to some better thought.

Some prisoners of war talk about surviving solitary confinement and even torture by distracting their awareness to some intellectual thought process or memory.  This is illustrated in the TV series Firefly with a story that depicts an ongoing discussion of the relationship of Captain Mel to Pilot Wash’s wife Zoe while they are being tortured. Both men suffer intensely, but the stronger mental focus of Captain Mel allows Wash to survive and to understand what is behind the “war stories” shared between Zoe and Mel. (spoiler alert!) They do not lose their minds even though Mel is actually killed and then revived. While this is TV, it is based on things that happen in the real world.

We instinctively scan for possibly unpleasant experiences in order to avoid them. It takes a lot of effort at first to allow someone else to do what we find irritating, while we look for something that feels better to think about, to pay attention to. I’m certainly working on that myself. Think of it this way: What right do I have to interfere in someone else’s life, especially if that person does not ask me to help?

Even if I let others else irritate me, I can back away (turn down the sensitivity–or at least work on turning it down) to find the awareness of what it is about what they are doing that irritates me.  Usually it’s something that I don’t like to admit that I do–a shadow projection. Allowing the awareness of how I am participating in being irritated is very informative. I can then take action to change myself.

Awareness is focused. I am insensitive to others when I am only thinking about my insecurities. When I am aware of the other person, I can listen and be present with less anxiety. The key is awareness and focus. The sensitivity helps to develop awareness, especially if I make the effort to find out to what kind of stimulus I am sensitive. But then it is up to me to do something about the sensitive spot.

If I find that a TV show (friend, book, activity)  moves me away from my desired vibration, then I decide whether to keep participating. If I can’t leave (turn it off, close it, stop it)  for whatever reason, I can shift my awareness to analysis of the situation, to observation, to something else. It is up to me to decide and to take action.

I can make  increased sensitivity a Good Thing, or I can suffer.