Last week I made a slightly embarrassing mistake a work. I hate it when that happens. But then, someone told me I looked good for being pregnant.
Maybe it’s just all this positive thinking stuff I’ve been doing, but I think it all evens out.
MOLLIE PLAYER
FEATS OF GREAT STRENGTH
Last week I carried out an experiment. Every day while commuting by metro to work, I self-tuned myself by saying repeatedly: “Today I am going to have a great day. I have enough time for all my tasks. Work comes and goes. The day is calm and smooth.”
Each day of that week went indeed calm and smooth, and I had time to accomplish all my tasks without any rush or stress.
Then, on another day I did not repeat that positive confirmation. And the day turned out to be hectic, stressful and energy-consuming.
Does this mean positive affirmations are crucial for a balanced and harmonious life?
I don’t think so.
Or, to be more precise, I believe they are just one of the factors that influence our lives and adjust the flow of our days. Besides, positive thinking and positive attitude are different things.
Yet perhaps positive affirmations are not fruitless either. At least two useful things that I took for myself are:
I still believe that action is the most important ingredient of the recipe–the fifth element, if you wish. The so-called “law of attraction” that has been advertised throughout the world is bollocks if not accompanied with action. However, using positive affirmations is not entirely wrong either.
But let me repeat myself–only if backed up with acting, making and doing.
On The Secret’s official website people regularly post their true law of attraction success stories. One that I especially liked comes from M.M. of Athens, who writes about how studying the law of attraction and becoming aware of how it works enabled her to overcome emotional eating (she lost 12 kilos in three months!)–plus find the inner peace and confidence she always sought.
It begins: “During 2011 and 2012 my life sucked. I was studying something I didn’t love while being pressured by my parents and family to keep studying it, I gained lots of weight and I had no idea what I wanted to do in my life. I felt lost, depressed and alone.”
You can read the rest of the story at thesecret.tv.
The law of attraction can be used to find lost things as well. I can substantiate my claim with a personal anecdote.
I have a pen drive of a violet colour. I occasionally use it to make printouts. The last time I came back home with my printouts I put it somewhere in my room, inadvertently.
My brother, who had come home that day, the day of an auspicious festival, needed the pen drive for some work. He asked me whether I had it. I nodded yes but when I started searching for it I could not find it. So, I decided to use the law of attraction to find it.
I imagined myself holding the pen drive in my hand and feeling good about it. Not to mention, I did it in a meditative state. I visualized plugging it in a USB port and happily transferring data into it.
My father came to my room this morning and admonished me for not cleaning up my mattress which is made of cotton and is very flexible. He lifted it from one end and started shaking it vigorously. Suddenly, the pen drive which was stuck in some corner of it, dropped.
I picked it up off the floor.
I just saw a page on your website where someone shared his experience about some law of attraction experiments he tried from the book E-Squared by Pam Grout.
I have always been skeptical about the law of attraction. But after reading this amazing book I thought of giving the prescribed experiment a try.
So, this was my intention: “I want to see money fallen on the ground.” Now I did not have any particular amount in my mind. But I thought if I see money on ground then I would take the law of attraction at its face value. Period.
Now, what happened is very interesting.
Initially, for some days, nothing happened.
One day, I was about to take a shower in the evening when I found that all the sachets of shampoos were out. As I was in the bathroom without a shirt but in a vest, I thought of going to a nearby shop without wasting any time to buy shampoo. Picking up my wallet, I left in haste. I reached the shop and bought shampoo. The shopkeeper returned me the change. But the change fell off my hands on the ground. I bent to pick my change. AND THERE WAS ANOTHER COIN ALREADY LYING ON THE GROUND!
There were two other guys standing around but none of them noticed that coin. I felt as if that coin was just waiting to be picked up by me only. I picked up that coin with my change money.
Now I do believe that a force that pervades every fabric of the universe is running the whole cosmos.
A few days ago my (online) friend Evan Griffith gave me a one-question interview. The question: “What one thing have you been doing recently that’s making your life better?”
Interested parties may read my answer (and some gushing about my books) at freakybeautiful.com.
I would like to share with you how I manifested my dream job.
Eight months after getting my masters degree, I got a job I very much disliked in my home country at a biopharmaceutical company. But because it took me that long to get a job, it was somewhat precious to me. However, after one year, I was even more miserable and burnt out that I ever was and decided that enough is enough. I took the leap of faith and quit without any other job lined up.
I took the time and freedom to explore what I really wanted to do and discovered my passion in the human resources field. However, the HR industry in my country is quite immature and I could not find any positions that fitted my aspirations, goals, capacity and capabilities. I applied to many HR position half-heartedly.
I have always dreamed of moving to a western country but was unsure on how to make it happen. After eleven months of unsuccessful attempts, I intensely decided that I will be getting a job offer for a dream position from abroad NOW. I created a Manifestation Book and wrote down daily entries of getting a great job and an amazing location.
A couple of days later I came across a job advertisement for a HR position in Germany. The position was all that I could ask for in a job. I applied to it. For the next 30-plus days, I spent most of my waking hours believing that the job was mine. I did everything it took to train my mind that I was getting the job. Besides the daily journal entry, I sent job offer emails to myself and also recorded myself affirming about getting the job and listened to it before going to sleep.
About ten days after the closing date of the application, I received an email from the company inviting me to the Assessment Centre in Germany!! The interview and assessments went smoothly and a week later they offered me the job!
The salary is great, the company is huge and famous and most importantly it is the job I had dreamed of and a dream location. I am starting on December 1st, 2014 in Germany and very much looking forward to it.
The Universe has given me what I wished for. If you really want something and believe with unshakable faith that you will have it, the whole Universe will conspire to make it happen.
Mitra
Holy crap, my life is amazing.
Was going to do some onsite training for my (work-from-home) job yesterday, and to do so I would’ve had to leave my one-year-old with a babysitter all day several days in a row for the first time. Kinda made peace with the whole thing last week, understanding that I was in the right place and doing the right thing by having the job I have, but today when I called my agent to ask when to go show up he said I don’t have to go to the training after all. And that when I do, it’ll only be one day a week, not two weeks straight.
The law of attraction strikes again?
Major breakthrough today: I finally figured out how to brush my one-year-old’s teeth. The trick is to use my electric toothbrush and let him push the button when it’s in his mouth with part of the bristles touching both the back and the front of the teeth. He likes the vibration and he loves the taste of the toothpaste (which before he just sucked off the brush). Getting the back teeth is still pretty tough but hey, I didn’t start brushing my back teeth until I was like, twenty-six.
I figure he has some time to get the hang of it.
A few years ago, Janna’s autistic son was facing a problem–a major one. He couldn’t get into the one school in the small village in which Janna’s family lived that could offer support for his disability.
“For three months I tried to get them to change their decision,” Janna writes. She even recruited some help: the psychologist and teachers at his rehabilitation center. However, nothing was working.
They kept saying no.
However, a believer in the power of the mind, Janna continued to visualize her son in the school she wanted him to be in. And, to further her visualization, she did something that was a bit . . . unconventional. She wrote on her Facebook status that her son had gotten accepted.
“Twenty people congratulated us, twenty people ‘liked’ my status, at least twenty people BELIEVED he got accepted to THAT school,” Janna wrote.
Three days later, the principal called and told her that since another child would be moving to another village, her son was indeed accepted to the school.
My husband knocked down a wall in our garage today. It was cool, if messy. Our plan is to make a woodshop in there and make custom shelving throughout the house. This development combines with my recently acquired love of gardening (free fruit? I’m in!) to mount a solid case for our advancing age.
Fortunately, as it turns out, being old is actually pretty awesome.
Is it a sign of my total lack of musical sophistication that I almost always agree with my one-year-old’s taste in music, as expressed in a modified Siskel-and-Ebert style with either a wail (no thumbs) a “more music!” (one thumb) or an “again!” (that coveted two-thumbs-up review)? Or is it just that he is a musical genius?
I’m just going to assume the latter and call it good.
I have always had a great passion for open-wheel race cars. Thankfully I’m finally in a financial position to be able to afford to participate on a purely armature, hobbyist level.
A few years ago, I purchased a vintage open-wheel road racing car and began competing locally. My wife, of course, thinks I’ve taken leave of my senses, but that’s another story. Then at the end of last season, I began thinking that I should upgrade to a better car. However, it was somewhat of a vague notion and not something I included in my affirmations or visualizations. I did put up an advertisement to sell my car in several of the classified sections of the enthusiast websites that I frequent.
As you can probably guess, I received zero responses from these ads. As I said, I liked my car and really didn’t want to sell it. I just thought that I probably should. Then about three weeks ago while I was at one of the local racing shops hanging out with my brother, I happened to mention to the owner of the shop that I might be looking for another car and mentioned the type, year, and model that I was looking for. He said “I have one just like that!” He walked me to the rear of the shop and pulled back a tarp covering the car in the corner. There it was! The exact car I had described. As I sat down in the seat I remember thinking, “I will have this car!” It was a very intense, emotional moment for me.
Now, the fact that the universe had materialized the perfect car, although pretty cool, is really not the point of this story. Here’s where it gets interesting. You see, my wife thinks I’ve gone around the bend anyway. If I came home and told her that I now own two race cars, you can imagine how that would go over.
All of a sudden, it became a very urgent need for me to sell my current car so that I could have the new one. I added this new car to my daily affirmations, and I constantly held it in my thoughts, visualizing how the seat felt, mentally holding the steering wheel in my hands, and feeling the exhilaration of driving the car. Then I got busy with writing and
everything else that I have going on, and although I didn’t forget about the situation, it got pushed to the back of my mind.
Then one day about a week ago, I opened my e-mail and had two, (That’s 2!) very serious responses to my online ads after eight months of nothing! A few days ago, I received a check for $2,500.00 in the mail as a deposit for the purchase of my current car.
Here’s the point of my story. (Yes, I do have one.) It wasn’t until I sat down to write this morning that I realized that the universe had materialized the sale of my car for me. I had attracted it, and because I was so busy with the ongoing details of my life, I had failed to fully realize what was going on. It just seemed like the natural turn of events
until I sat and reflected on everything that had transpired.
Pay attention to the small miracles and synchronicities that happen. Connect the dots. You’ll be amazed at what you notice.
Cary David Richards
Got a great haircut today. I love it when that happens. It’s all super short and now I look all long-necked and cheek-bony. In a good way. I almost walked out when I saw the hairdresser, though, whose hair vaguely resembled a beehive. Also, his chairside manners left something to be desired. But then I remembered that I once got my haircut in a back alley in India, and realized it could hardly be worse than that. And this place cost like ten times as much.
And so, my hair is now worthy of my awesomeness.
Thanks, Abrupt Hairstylist. Keep doing your beehive thing.
You’re awesome.
Here’s something straight from the front flap of my new book, You’re Getting Closer: One Year of Finding God and a Few Good Friends:
“And so, I’ve decided: this is the year I am going to get friends. It is also the year I’m going to figure out how to pray without ceasing, to live in a state in which every action that I take, every word that I speak and every thought that I think comes from the Source inside myself far beyond my conscious mind.
I am going to communicate with the Divine, and not just occasionally—I’m going to do it all day long.
I really don’t know if I will be successful but I do know this: if I’m not, it won’t be for lack of trying.”
Well, I finally did it. After about ten years of considering the idea, last year I actually attempted, as the Apostle Paul advises in the Bible, to “pray without ceasing”–to communicate in an ongoing way throughout with the Divine. If an experiment like this interests you, you’ll probably enjoy my most recently published book about it, called You’re Getting Closer: One Year of Finding God and a Few Good Friends.
Thanks for your support throughout my writing journey. I look forward to reading your comments here, via email at mollie@mollieplayer.com, and in your Amazon.com reviews.
The other day I was reading over some affirmations I wrote in my journal about a year ago. Some of them were things that at the time I never thought would come true but since did. The most significant of these: “I am naturally thin.”
The short version of the story: Every year I give myself a present on my birthday–anything from an expensive pair of boots to a compliment. On my birthday last year (my thirtieth), that gift was that I would officially give up binge eating and dieting–after over ten straight years of it.
And I did.
To my surprise, I lost even more weight since then, so that now, for the first time since high school, I am naturally thin (thin without dieting).
If that was all I had accomplished all year, it would have been a great one.
Today I gave my phone to my toddler and predictably, the result was not good. However, when he asks for something, it is my habit to say “no” as infrequently as humanly possible. This is a fault of mine, but as is the case with most of my faults: it’s also just part of my charm.
(Have I mentioned recently that I am awesome?)