LOTUS V: Gratitude

This lesson is an introduction to the way the Universe sees Gratitude.  The power of Gratitude underlies so much of the Law of Attraction, it is helpful if we pause for moment to develop a deeper grasp of it

We’ve learned that thoughts and emotions are the nouns and verbs of the Creatrix.  Within this context, Gratitude is the language itself.   The use of thoughts and emotions produce Gratitude in the same way that using nouns and verbs help to produce a Language.   Our definition of Gratitude is a little different than you might be familiar with, so I’ll define it here as a good starting point. 

Gratitude is the energy we give to a memory.  This bears some explanation. 

As humans we have the ability to direct many forms of energy.  For example, when we think, we use energy.  When we get angry, we use energy.  When we wash dishes, we use energy.  We can use so much energy, we become drained.  We can become emotionally drained.  We can become mentally fatigued.  We can become physically spent.  Taken in the aggregate, our thoughts, emotions, and actions comprise most of human energy.  They comprise the things that we do to express or direct our energy.   

Now let’s see how this might apply to Gratitude.  Josie’s car breaks down on the highway and her cell phone goes dead while she tries to call for help.  This causes her to miss a very important meeting, lose a client, and basically ruins her day.  Afterwards, she might direct her energy to the event.  She might tell her spouse about it, her friends, or her boss – this would be fairly common, and in many cases, even necessary.  But she might go further and let this event ruin her entire day, even her entire week.  She might dwell on it, feel frustrated, and even have difficulty falling asleep thinking about it. She might chastise herself for not having charged her cell phone before she left home that afternoon, or for not having renewed her auto club membership last month, or that she should have gotten her car into the shop the first time she heard that strange knocking noise in the engine.  She might worry about how she will pay for the repairs, and wonder how she will manage over the next few days with one less automobile. 

Oddly enough, the Universe sees this outpouring of thoughts, emotions, and actions as Gratitude for this event. 

Gratitude is the energy we give to a memory. 

Why is negative energy considered gratitude?  Recall that we are here to experience the spectrum of all of life’s experience – from the heights of euphoria to the depths of sadness.  Emotion adds color to our life, and without emotion, our life would be a banal existence.  The Universe does not label emotions as good or bad.  It does not label thoughts as good or bad.  Remember that the Creatrix is analogous to a machine.  It is a natural law, and as a natural law has no more ability to judge a situation than gravity has.  It’s incapable of judging whether an energy we are experiencing is desirable or not.  The only action of the Creatrix, its only function in fact, is to monitor the energy we give to something, and then re-direct that energy back to us, in kind.  This re-directed, returned energy takes the form of events in our lives that mirror back to us our outpouring energies, or as the universe sees it – as the gratitude we give to something. 

Ask a coach, a parent, a teacher, a friend – it really doesn’t matter – all of them will tell you that if you put your energy into something, you will get results.  Whatever you direct your energy at, expands.  If you practice playing your guitar, you will become a better guitar player; if you practice hitting more serves, your tennis game will improve; if you study harder, your grades will go up.  Conversely, if you direct most of your energies to playing video games or surfing the net, neither your tennis game nor your grades will improve.  This principle is obvious and basic.  And yet we fail to realize that it extends far beyond studying or hitting serves.  It is the basis of the Law of Attraction.   Focusing our energies on something yields results in the very thing we are focusing on. 

Gratitude is energy given to a memory.   Whether the energy produces good feelings or bad feelings is inconsequential to the universe.  It’s like putting different brands of batteries into a flashlight.  As long as the battery has a charge (energy), the flashlight will light up.  It’s doesn’t care what you think about the brand of the battery, or whether you hold some grievance toward the company that manufactured it.  It is the energy it produces that’s important to the flashlight.  And this is how the Universe works.   

When the Creatrix produces events in our lives, the more of our energy we give in the form of thoughts, emotions, and actions to the memory of these events, the more of those types of events will manifest in our lives.  This is the Law of Attraction in action.  It is no more mystical than saying that if we were to start working out every day, then we would start to get in better shape and to feel better.  Whatever you direct your energy at, expands.  This is the effect of Gratitude on the Law of Attraction, which could as easily be called the Law of Gratitude, because it is our Gratitude, our outgoing energy, that literally attracts back to us incoming energy in the form of manifested events in our lives.  Gratitude and Attraction are two sides of the same coin.  They’re the Yin and Yang of the Universe. 

Gratitude is our communication to the universe, directing it to give us what we want.  The events that are being produced in our lives are the Universe’s communication back to us, the attraction side of the coin.  We ask for what we want in our lives, and the Universe creates it. 

Gratitude is to the Universe exactly what Feedback is to the communication sciences, and this is true both in personal communications and in data communications.  Ask any systems designer and they will tell you the importance of feedback when transmitting data.  Ask anyone who studies human communication, and they will tell you the same thing.  Feedback is essential to the communication process.  It is essential to language.  And Gratitude is the feedback of the Language of the Universe.  It is the way to tell the Universe what we really want – the way to confirm that the events happening in our lives matches our desires. 

I found it odd that The Secret, as powerful and as motivational as that movie was, did not focus on this subject any more than it did.  It is so important, and so fundamental to the Law of Attraction.  It was left out of the movie’s three step process.  Yet Gratitude is EVERYTHING.  It is the core of the Law.  If you did nothing more than maintain a constant state of gratitude for the positive events in your life (as opposed to the negative ones), you would soon have everything you wanted in life.  This sounds easy, but in practice it’s very difficult.  LOTUS Lesson II explains how inertia, in the form of habitual thoughts, feelings, and actions, poses a major hurdle for us to overcome.  Regardless of the difficulties, knowing that Gratitude holds the key to the Law of Attraction and that it is the Force that powers the Law, allows us to construct methods and techniques that use this knowledge to our advantage. 

Always remember, Gratitude is energy given to a memory. It doesn’t matter whether that energy is comprised of negative thoughts and emotions or positive ones, the Universe simply sees it as energy. 

Once this idea is firmly rooted in your mind, then the next few lessons will take on a greater meaning for you.  This understanding provides us a springboard to jump into the practice of Mitigating Turbulence, our next LOTUS Lesson.

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LOTUS III: The Language of the Universe – The Practice

Audio Version:  LOTUS III – The Practice

In Part II of this Series, we discussed how the act of Conscious Creation frequently produces the opposite of the desired result.  This begs the question – if the most common result of ‘creating’ our life is to produce the opposite effect of what we desire, is there a way we can change this result? 

Essentially, our brain and body has a wonderful built-in mechanism that creates habits out of routine thoughts, actions, and feelings.  This mechanism allows us to talk, play musical instruments, type on a keyboard, tie our shoes, and it even controls our breathing, heartbeat, immune system functions, assimilation of food, hormone production, metabolism, etc.  Without this mechanism, life as we know it would be impossible.  Humans simply could not exist, nor could any higher-level form of life. 

The habitual nature of our thoughts is not due to our weak will power to change them or to a flaw in our personality.  It is due to the powerful forces of evolution as they take over routine activities freeing up our mind to focus on higher and higher levels of thought.  That is far from a weakness.  Our habitual thoughts and feelings are driven by a highly sophisticated, interlocking, self-supporting, natural physical cycle that connects neural networks in our brain directly to our cellular bio-chemistry.  And this cycle is 100% supported and maintained by ‘physical addiction’ –an addiction, in fact, to the most powerful drugs on the planet – the body’s own neurochemicals.

In the distant past, this system served mankind quite well.  However, today we face a world-wide addiction to cortisol, a natural hormone produced by the brain.  Cortisol is THE stress hormone, and it controls the ‘fight or flight’ response produced by threatening situations.  To the caveman, a threat from a sabre-tooth tiger initiated a hormonal cascade that prepared the body to fight the tiger or to flee from it.  This physiological response heightened certain physical abilities by re-directing blood flow away from vital areas to muscles and the heart and lungs.  It also directed internal energies away from immediate needs.  For example, immune system function decreased and digestion slowed.  These energies didn’t dissipate, but were redirected elsewhere in the body as blood pressure went up, breathing increased, blood sugar increased to provide fuel to muscles, and reflex responses accelerated, among many other changes.  The body generally prepared itself to fight or to flee.  The fight or the fleeing that was certain to follow reduced the cortisol in the body, thus helping the body return to a more normal function.

Things are different in today’s world.  We don’t fight tigers today.  But we do fight customers, spouses, bosses, parents, children, and the guy in the car next to us.  Of course, we don’t really fight them, but threats from them are treated just the same as if that tiger was about to eat you.  Your cortisol levels increase, and you physiologically prepare to fight or flee, whether or not you consciously realize it.  Unfortunately, in the board room, at the water cooler, or in our car, we can’t fight or flee, so our cortisol levels don’t return to normal very quickly.  Instead they stay elevated.  In time, our cells become addicted to the neurochemicals that cortisol controls, and when our cells do not get their chemical fix often enough, the brain initiates stressful thoughts and feelings and memories designed to produce more cortisol, locking us — all of us — into a permanent, chemically dependent state of stress. 

As a result, in our world, what was meant to be a short-term, one-time biological adjustment becomes chronic: our blood pressure stays elevated, our blood sugar levels stay elevated, our immune response stays chronically weakened, the blood flow to our brain stays diminished and it becomes difficult to concentrate, and our muscles feel tense and start to hurt (cortisol also controls inflammation).  High blood pressure (heart disease), elevated blood sugar levels (diabetes), lack of concentration, and joint pain – do any of these sound familiar.  These IS the world we live in.  It is brought on by stress.  Chronic stress.   When homeostasis, the desired physiological condition, becomes an unrealized state, we start to suffer mentally, emotionally, and physically.  Chronic stress affects our thoughts, emotions, and our bodies.  If you are into holistic medicine, then you realize that stress is THE Holistic Disease. 

And it, stress, controls the state of humanity at the present moment.  Unfortunately, this state of being, with its associated dependencies, thoughts, feelings, and memories creates the very reality around us through the action of the Creatrix.  A reality which many most of us want to change. 

It is very hard to break the stress cycle that is so prevalent in today’s world.  There is a lot working against us. 

Can we overcome this cycle?  Is it possible?  Yes.  Definitely. 

Is it worth it?  Absolutely. 

It really isn’t hard.  But it DOES take commitment, time, and effort.  This is NOT a ‘only 20 minutes a day and change your life forever’ online infomercial.  This isn’t a scam, and I am not selling snake oil.  There is no magic bullet here, nor do I believe in magic bullets.   This is, however, reality – the way things really work.  I’d love to tell you that ‘In only five minutes a day, you too can be a billionaire, marry a super-model, and have the body of a super-hero.”  I’d love to tell you that, but it isn’t true.   

However, what is true is that our life, our world, and our reality is totally within our control – completely.  The only thing stopping you from having everything you’ve ever dreamed of is simply the right knowledge.   We can divide this in to three areas:  1) how the Creatrix speaks to us, 2) how we communicate to it, and 3) how the mechanism of Inertia works in our lives.  Once we fully grasp the nuances of these things, it is just a matter of building a plan of action and executing it.  When we do this, when we make this commitment and put forth the effort, life stops being hard, and life…

… yes…  I’ll go so far as to say it…

… life becomes magical. 

Creating a New Life

To create a magical life, a fairy-tale existence, there are several approaches we can take.  We can 1) learn ways to circumvent the stress response and the resultant hormonal cascade that rampages through our body, 2) employ methods and techniques to mitigate the Turbulence produced by the Creatrix, and 3) overwhelm the Creatrix with consciously directed thoughts and feelings superseding the subconsciously produced ones. 

Circumventing the Stress Response

Medical science and recent discoveries related to the both the human brain and heart have provided us technological ways to circumvent the stress response.  Most of these work to turn off the part of the brain that produces cortisol and activate the parts of the brain that produce serotonin and other needed bio-chemicals.  In addition to providing a needed rest from the chronic overproduction of cortisol, it also allows our body to start to produce new, healthier and happier internal chemical addictions.  Most importantly, it breaks the cycle of negative thoughts and emotions that confuse the Creatrix.  In short, it clarifies our intent and communication to the Universe, and produces more consistent, desirable events in our lives. 

Mitigating Turbulence

By further dissecting the Language of the Universe, we find simple techniques that we can employ throughout the day to mitigate the Turbulence from the Creatrix.  These techniques are, in essence, the other side of the coin.  While technologies can be used to break the stress cycle and eliminate negative thoughts and feelings, these techniques provide ways for us to maintain more positive thoughts and emotions throughout the day. 

Overwhelming the Creatrix

Simple modifications to our daily visualizations can also help us overwhelm the Creatrix through careful use of appropriate sub-modalities, emotional anchors, affirmations, and other techniques.  These techniques are really nothing more than learning to speak the Language of the Universe more powerfully. 

Each of these approaches – 1) Circumventing the Stress Response, 2) Mitigating Turbulence, and 3) Overwhelming the Creatrix – and their applied techniques will be presented in greater detail in future LOTUS series posts.

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LOTUS II: The Language of the Universe – The Problem

Audio Version: LOTUS II – The Problem

You walk up to a bank teller.  The teller asks, “May I help you?’  You reply, “Money.”  The teller scrunches her eyebrows together and asks, “Money?’  You nod your head, and repeat, “Money.”

Now, what does the teller think?  Does she have any idea what you want?  She might think you want to steal money.  If someone comes up to a teller and say’s money, it does come across like that.  But you do nothing more than say the word, ‘money’, so she doesn’t really know.  You might want to borrow money, or to withdraw or deposit money.  You might even want to pay back money you borrowed from the bank.  In and of itself, this single word, this concept, this idea of ‘money’ gives the teller no idea of what you actually want. 

Now imagine that this isn’t just any teller.  This teller is THE Teller of the Creatrix, working for the Bank of the Universe, and this teller MUST provide you service.  She must give you exactly what you desire.  In fact, it’s the Law, and she can no more break that law than an apple can fall upward when it breaks free from the tree. 

So, in accordance with the Law and in order to determine what you want, the teller hands you a $20 bill… and then she wrestles you to the floor and tries to take money from your wallet… and then… to your amazement… she calmly gets up, grabs a loan application and hands it to you!  A little frustrated at this point, you remind yourself that she must, by Law, take action, because she must give you what you want.  Unfortunately, since she doesn’t know what you want, her actions can be quite Turbulent.  And that is exactly how the Universe responds to you when it is confused – with Turbulence. 

I know that many of you have heard the idea that thoughts become things, or something to this effect.  This idea, as controversial as it is, has a powerful basis in truth, but, unfortunately this particular statement is woefully incomplete.  There is more to it, and although most teachers point this out, I believe many people who embrace this idea completely miss the point.  So let me take a shot at it…

I ask you to imagine a beach full of people.  The sun is shining, people are sunbathing, some are in the ocean, some are having a picnic.  It is a beautiful day.  In your mind’s eye, you see people… you see places… you see things.  Hmmm…  You see people, places, and things.  Isn’t that the very definition of a Noun? Well, that’s how the universe sees your images – as nouns. 

Of course, these people are ‘doing something’ in your vision, and, therefore, your vision includes ‘verbs’.  But to the Universe, such actions are not relevant.  ‘Verbs’, to the Universe, are very relevant, but actions are not considered verbs by the Universe.  We’ll talk more about in a moment. 

Until then, let’s revisit the Teller of the Creatrix.  If money is a noun, and a verb is required to for a complete sentence, what can you do to clarify yourself?  Very simple.  Right?  Just add a verb.  Instead of saying “Money”, say “Withdraw money.”  Now the teller knows what you want.  Unfortunately, as just pointed out, the Universe does not recognize action verbs.  It would be like to trying to speak Popsicle to an Eskimo.  They might know what a Popsicle is but they certainly don’t speak it. 

The Language of the universe only considers one type of verb – to feel or, we might say, to emote.  We are here to experience the richness of life, and therefore, the only relevant ‘action’ the universe considers important are our feelings and emotions.  These are the verbs of the Universe, and these are the only verbs. 

Given this, it would be more logical to go to the Teller of the Creatrix and say, “I want to feel good about money.”  Hearing this, she will create events in your financial life that cause you to feel good.  It that’s simple.  On paper, anyway.  However, in practice, there are some serious complications. 

Enter Inertia. 

If you want to have more of something, it means that you have been entertaining thoughts and feelings that created the reality you live in – a reality where you are lacking the very thing you want more of.  Moreover, it is very likely that these thoughts and feelings that have created scarcity for you have become habitual.  When thoughts and feelings become habitual for long enough, a status quo is created that rarely changes.  The fabric of your reality becomes relatively smooth.  You may not like the texture, but the fabric becomes as smooth as a geometric plane. 

Given your dislike of your current situation, you ask the universe, using the most proper language that you can, using images and emotions, for more of the thing you don’t have enough of.  You do this for a total of twenty minutes, and then go about your merry way.  Unfortunately, your thoughts and feelings habitually revert back to the same thoughts and feelings that created the world you are trying to change to start with.  Said differently, inertia kicks in. 

In these situations, the Teller of the Creatrix becomes confused.  Hmmm… she thinks.  What does this person really want?  I am getting mixed signals.  I am required, by Law, to help them, so I will communicate back to them.  I will create events in their lives, many events related to the thing they want to change, and I will monitor their feelings about these events.  I will watch and whatever events elicit the most feelings, those are the events they must want, so I will give them more of those. 

You might want to read that last sentence a few more times.  I repeat it here just in case it didn’t really sink in: I will watch and whatever events elicit the most feelings, those are the events they must want, AND I WILL GIVE THEM MORE OF THOSE. 

This action on the part of the universe, resulting from its confusion, results in Turbulence in your life.  You communicate mixed signals to the universe, and it communicates back in terms of an increased number of events related to your desire in your life.  It produces wrinkles in your smooth financial reality.  And these events will be both good and bad, because the universe is trying to determine what you really want.  Creating various events is its way of asking you what you want. 

The universe’s purpose is to give you whatever emotional experience that you tell it you want – good or bad.  So… here is what happens to most practitioners of the Law of Attraction.  We will use money as the example here.  It works for anything however, from relationships, to spiritual growth, to athletic or academic success – you fill in the blank with whatever you want to change.

Lucy, a new practitioner of the Law of Attraction, wants to turn around her financial situation, which has eroded over the years into an unbearable amount of debt.  She has just lost her job, and her creditors are about to start carrying everything she owns away.  It’s time for a major change, and it’s time she got serious about this LOA stuff.

She begins to consciously create – twice a day in fact, morning and evening, and within a week, she receives a large check for $650 from her mortgage company for an overfunded escrow account.  She is elated, and wonders if this LOA thing just might really work.  Two days later her car won’t start, and she is shocked to discover that it will cost $1,200 to get it fixed.  She starts to worry about her finances and how she is going to pay for the repairs, and she wonders if maybe she is doing something wrong.  She doesn’t quite give up on her twice-a-day creating activity, however, because she tells herself it is just a matter of time… okay, well she hopes so anyway. 

The next week, her refrigerator stops running, and it costs her $800 to replace. 

Now she is really worried and very confused.  And she is frustrated and even a little angry.  This is exactly the opposite of what was supposed to happen!  She can’t believe that in only one week’s time, two unexpected, major expenses hit her, and she is out $2,000,and she really can’t believe it happened while she was TRYING TO CREATE MORE MONEY!  Intensely frustrated, she stops creating and the new financial events affecting her life slow down to a crawl.  The Turbulence in her life winds back down to a status quo.  Lucy finds a new job making exactly what she did before and continues to struggle financially, just as she always has. 

Has this happened to you?  I know from personal experience, as well as from talking to others, that this not only happens, but it is the most common initial result of applying the Law of Attraction.  Why is this?  What has happened here? 

Lucy clearly communicated to the Creatrix what she desired, but the moment she stopped with the ‘good’ feelings and thoughts, the old ones, the habitual ones, kicked back in, sending multiple mixed communications to the Universe.  The Creatrix, like the machine that it is, immediately sensed a change, a wrinkle if you will, in Lucy’s smooth, but financially challenged life.  The Creatrix knew that Lucy was trying to change something about her financial life, since she was spending so much time focusing on it.  But it was receiving mixed communications, and it had to, by Law, respond.  It had to communicate back. 

So the Creatrix began creating an abnormally large number of financial events in Lucy’s life, creating Turbulence in her previously smooth financial life.  And not knowing whether Lucy’s wanted to experience more pain in her financial life or more good feelings about it, the Creatrix created both, and (here is a very important point), it monitored her emotional reactions to see which she really wanted.  It wanted feedback.  It defined feedback as the amount of emotional energy, good or bad, that Lucy gave to the events in her life. 

And Lucy gave it the feedback she wanted; initially she gave it worry, fear and confusion, but soon that expanded into frustration and anger.  All of these emotions Lucy mentally ‘anchored’ to the idea of money.  So the universe began to give her more negative events than positive ones.  This would have continued, but ironically and fortunately, Lucy gave up trying to create a better financial life, and the events created by the Creatrix in her life slowed down to a more normal frequency.  In fact, her life settled back down to the way it had always been.  It slowed down to her previous vibratory rate, to her previous inertia, and there it settled into a smooth status quo. 

Can this result be avoided?  Can it be circumvented?  The answer is a resounding ‘yes.’  Armed with the knowledge of the Language of the Universe, certain protocols and practices can be implemented that are specifically designed to alleviate and mitigate the negative events related to Turbulence. 

That is the Topic of Part III.

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LOTUS I: The Language of the Universe – The Theory

Audio Version:  LOTUS I

The Four Fundamental Postulates of the The Language of the Universe. 

Our world is being created moment by moment.   The creation of our world did not end at its beginning.  It did not end at the moment of creation.  The universe is in a state of continuous creation.  This can be conceptualized as though each moment is being created one right after another in very short time sequences – very much like a motion picture.  Each new ‘frame’ is created based on our collective ‘intents’, which is a combination of our past inertia of thought, as well as our current intent.  In essence, we co-create consistent with our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, along with other’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, within a universal framework.  It is important to realize that although we are the creators of our reality, the activity of creation conforms to Universal Law – we create within the framework of this Law.  This framework is the Creatrix, a creation matrix governed by Universal Law within which we co-create our reality.  In essence, the act of creation incorporates two levels:  1) co-creation of our reality with other conscious minds 2) within the framework and operational rules of the Creatrix. 

The universe creates our world based on what we tell it we want.  The Creatrix operates like a machine, without thought or judgment, and creates, by Universal Law, exactly what we tell it we want.  It was designed to provide us a complete spectrum of life’s experiences, centered in emotion – all emotions.  Its purpose is to allow us to experience the full richness of life ranging from tragedy and sadness to love, success, and happiness.  It does not judge our requests.  It does not assume anything, because the Creatrix is not God or the Universe, but rather a set of Universal Laws that operate like a computer program – with unquestioning precision and unfailing accuracy. 

The universe understands an elegant, simple language.  The Creatrix understands our desires and intents through a simple language that is structured much like our own – with nouns (thoughts), verbs (emotions), and tenses (submodalities).  It does not, however, understand any human language, except to the extent that language might elicit aspects of the language it understands, such as a conversation that brings up memories (thoughts) and feelings (emotions) of a past (submodality) event.  The Creatrix communicates back to us in an obvious and direct way, by manifesting events in our lives that mirror back to us its understanding of our desires and intents. 

The ability of the universe to create our wants is a function of our ability to communicate to the universe in the language it understands.  The better we understand the laws governing the Creatrix, the more effective we can become at creating the world we desire.  Conversely, if we do not understand how the Creatrix communicates, we will fail to communicate to it effectively and fail to manifest our true desires and intents. 

These four postulates form the basis of our reality, and our ability to create the world we want is a direct result of our ability to master their understanding.  Part II in this series discusses each of them in greater depth, and Part III and future LOTUS Series provide techniques that allow us to put this knowledge into a powerful practice.

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Creating the Ideal Life

What is it we all want in life?  I’ll give you a hint: it’s really simple, and it’s the same for each of us.  It’s just to be happy.  That’s really all there is to it.  That’s all there is to life.  And yet… each of us is different, unique in our own way.  What makes me happy may not necessarily make you happy.  We each have to understand what our happiness means.  What life, what ideal life, would make us happy?  Before we can have that life, we must understand what such a life would look like.  In fact, that’s the first step to make your life better – to understand exactly what you want your life to be. 

I first undertook this task several years ago.  I failed miserably.  It seems I really didn’t know what I wanted.  I thought I did.  Everything I considered was colored and tainted by my current situation and place in my life.  Things clouded my vision; my age, my home, my career, my health, my kids, my spouse, my parents, my culture, and my financial situation all influenced what I thought my ideal life should be. 

So, as I undertook this exercise, nothing I visualized ever resonated as true.  Sure, my vision of an ideal life was nice – I’d like to have it, but it never really felt like me.   Something was missing.  I suspect this is true of all of us.  But then, seemingly out of nowhere, I discovered two techniques, or tricks, if you will, that allow us to see through our ‘clouds’ and clearly see what our heart really desires. 

The first technique is a trick of the mind.  It probably is more relevant to the westernized world that elsewhere, but you live in an industrialized, capitalistic, materialistic world that most of us do, this will help.  To start, simply sit back, relax, take a few minutes to calm your mind, and then start to imagine what your ideal life would be.  Imagine where you would live, what your day would be like, what you would do for a living, and anything else that seems relevant to you.  Your ideal life is uniquely yours, so do not worry if you leave something out that someone else might feel is important.  What is important is only what you think.  Now here’s the first trick – imagine that money does not exist.   For this exercise, money is not important.  Divorce it from your mind. 

Did that change your image?  Did that affect where you live, what you drive, where you work, what you do for a living?  Does it affect what you eat?  How often you exercise?  What classes you take?  You are completely free to live life as you choose, with no monetary restrictions.  Imagine that.  How would you live it? 

When monetary concerns are removed from the equation, it becomes easier to see if money is influencing our decisions.  This exercise had a profound influence on my understanding of what I wanted out of life.  It also made me realize how much money influenced what I thought I wanted.   

For you, however, money may not be the ‘clouding’ issue.  It may be parents, or children, or education, or a particular job or boss.  Regardless of what obsession in your life might be clouding your vision, remove it, and imagine a life without it.  And THAT will be your ideal life.

There is another trick I have found that works.  Have you ever done something that energized you?  Have you ever talked about something that got you excited?  For many of us, we can literally feel the excitement rising in the pit of our stomach.  Some things will fuel that positive energy, while other things elicit fear in exactly the same area of our bodies.  If you are wondering what path may be right for you, just take a moment to ‘feel.’  Are you energized thinking about it?  Or are you scared or anxious?  Can you not wait to get started?  Do you pop out of bed ready to face the day?  This energizing feeling is a key.  It is a sign that you are on the right path. 

When you visualize your ideal life, observe your reactions and feelings.  Are you excited?  Do you feel that rising energy in the pit of your stomach?  Or do you have no real reaction, or worse, are you scared?  The energy you feel is a clear sign if you are on the right path or not.  Become aware of it, and let it be your guide.

If you remove money, or whatever obsession clouds your vision, and if you pay close attention to how different thoughts and visions affect your emotions and energy, you will be able to clearly understand what you ideal life should look like.

And once you’ve identified that, it’s just a simple matter of making it happen.  But more about that later!

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