Category Archives: A Few Things I Noticed While Trying to Improve Myself

The importance of being ready to accomplish a goal before trying to do so is something I learned a long time ago, when I was in my early twenties. I was still an Evangelical Christian and still struggling each day to be perfect—or nearly perfect, whatever that meant to me at the time. I was also in a pretty bad depression spell, which made getting out of bed really hard sometimes. One morning as I lay there, tired and unmotivated, I remember thinking, I should skip my first class today. It wasn’t a thought that just came to me as a matter of course, a side effect of whatever enervation or despondency I was feeling in that moment. This time, it felt different. It felt like it was someone else that was saying it to me, as in, instead of I shouldn’t go to class today, the thought was actually, You shouldn’t go to class today. It was an “other person” kind of feeling—and the other person wasn’t someone bad or negative, but someone good, someone wise.

It was someone I should listen to.

In any case, I didn’t listen to that voice in my head that day. Instead, remembering my commitment to myself and to my concept of God, and maybe, even, to my reputation with others at the school (not sure about this one, though I did have some pretty strange ideas about what people should think of me back then), I got up, got dressed, and went to class. In a piece I wrote about it, I describe what happened next in this way:

“As it turned out, though, I didn’t feel virtuous; instead, I just felt dumb. That morning, the professor ended the lecture after fifteen minutes to pass out some books to the class.

I hadn’t even ordered a book.”

And that is when I learned a lesson that since then has been a huge part of my identity, a huge part of who I am and what I choose to do and not to do. I learned that not only do I really not have to try to be perfect—but that actually, I shouldn’t do so. I’ve found that when you truly, sincerely want to change, your whole being comes into alignment with that change, and someday—sometimes without even realizing it—the change is just there. It just happens.

It’s like magic.

What’s more, whether the change happens right away or several years into the future, when it does finally come, it is the perfect time. Because then, it isn’t something that you forced to happen inside you—it is something that just happened naturally, without a great deal of effort.

It is easy—and, more important, it is real.

There’s an affirmation that I like to say that goes like this: “I live in the easy world, where everything is easy.” Some people might find this idea a little strange, even somewhat heretical. For those people (and I used to be one of them), life is a struggle, and properly so. Saying that things should be easy and light and beautiful and that most of the time our difficulties are self-created and unnecessary is something they just can’t even imagine to be true.

And this is to be expected; it is what we are all indoctrinated to believe from the get-go in our society. From parents on down the line to books, movies and television, we are constantly reminded that life is hard, that whatever is worth having in life is worth struggling for, that arguments and conflict are natural and necessary, and so on and on.

Amazingly—inexplicably, almost—I just don’t buy this anymore. These days, I believe that life is not the great hardship that people say is—or doesn’t have to be, at least. I believe that if you want it to be, and if you choose for it to be (this, of course, is the key), life is actually light, and happy, and very, very beautiful, and properly so, and that the hardest thing about it is just remembering that it is actually easy.

And so, I say my “easy world” affirmation. And here is the image that I have in my mind as I say it: I am standing on an ocean beach, wearing a very comfortable oversized men’s flannel shirt and very loose white linen pants with the cuffs rolled up. Water is washing up over my ankles, and I am smiling.

As I stand there, I am able to see via some special sense an image of my other self, the “real-world” Mollie, as she goes about her day’s activities. I watch her as she eats, sleeps, writes, runs errands and carries out the various goals she’s made for her time on earth. I admire the way she continues to pursue them even though I know that she takes them much too seriously, and that she doesn’t really need to do anything at all.

And that is my image of my real self, the real, enlightened Mollie. Whatever it is that I’m choosing to do on a particular day, I am actually doing nothing—merely watching myself do things. Because really, I’m still on the beach.

Life is what you make of it. It isn’t anything until then. If I never reach enlightenment, here, now, so that I can see and experience what it is like, and use it to make this life better, that is actually okay. There is no need, no requirement from on high saying I must seek greater spiritual awareness in this life, and there is no punishment waiting for me if I don’t succeed in this goal. I choose to seek what I seek for my own reasons, and that is all.

And so, I choose today not to rush into this thing we call enlightenment. I choose not to worry about “where I’m at” spiritually, but instead just watch, and observe, and make myself aware of what I want to have and where I want to be.

I choose to give myself time.

After all, if I don’t do this, if I choose to work for what I want rather than just letting it come to me, there can only be one reason: I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten who I really am, and that this particular sack of water we call a body is not me.

I’ve forgotten that really, I am that girl in the white linen pants who is standing on the beach, doing nothing, with no need to prove herself, and nothing to accomplish at all.

In a previous post, I described my personal take on spirituality in a general way. I emphasized the importance of seeing all of life as a spiritual practice, rather than simply believing a certain set of ideas. But ideas can be important, too, and so can dogma. They can help guide you on your path.

That’s why today I’m going to list for you some of the major spiritual practices I’ve discovered and committed to over the past few months. Here they are:

1. Say affirmations frequently.

2. Pray for ten minutes every morning.

3. Read books on spirituality.

4. Journal negative thoughts and counter each with positive ones.

5. Attend church and cultivate friendships with spiritual people.

6. Send healing, loving energy to others.

7. Respect people no matter where they are at in their journey and how evolved they are.

8. Be open to new friendships and new experiences at all times.

9. Do not distract yourself with computer games and television when not with others. Use the time alone for intellectual or spiritual growth or reflection, etc.

10. Meditate. Imagine your spiritual guide (in my case, my baby Jane). Talk to her, either silently or out loud.

11. Allow yourself to experience all emotions fully, especially sympathy and compassion.

12. Make friendships a priority. Seek was to communicate acceptance, love, peace and joy to others.

13. Sing.

14. Each and every day, make the decision to listen to your inner guidance and intuition. Regularly check in with it, asking what is best to do next. Practice following the voice until it becomes a deeply ingrained habit.

15. Let your sadness be a path to more spiritual awareness and more compassion for others.

16. Every soul is holy. Honor each one you come into contact with.

17. Do not be offended by others. Respect their journeys. Show them more love than they expect.

18. Focus on good feelings, not bad ones. Be a light-focused, positive person.

So. These are the spiritual practices I’ve outlined for myself so far. I call them dogma, but they aren’t rigid rules like that word implies. I don’t think I could ever be that way about religion again.

Thank God.

So, there are lots of reasons faith works, I think. One of them is what I call The Echo.

Spiritual people often ascribe almost magical powers to words. Affirmations, they say, can and do affect major change, every day. And I agree with them. Here’s why.

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and one of you says something a little shocking and, whether it’s true or not, it sort of creates an “echo” in everyone’s ears for the next few minutes–or longer? Maybe they said, “I love the feeling of a sunburn on my skin”–something harmless but a little strange like that–but for some reason, you can’t get it out of your head, and no matter what anyone says after that, the conversation inevitably returns to this idea?

Well, this kind of thing happens to me all the time, and so I came up for a name for it. I call it “The Echo.”

Sometimes, The Echo is positive. Someone said they loved your hair, for instance. Other times, though, it is negative. Someone said they hated the way a certain friend of theirs always scratched their nose in a way that looked like they were picking it.

And the next time you see that person, what are you going to be thinking about? “Oh, this is the chick that picks her nose.”

The Echo is a powerful thing, I think, because it can change the mood of a conversation or even an entire room.

This, by the way, is the reason names are so important. Everybody who works at a company identifies unconsciously with the name of the company, so if it is a good one–creative, insightful, successful-sounding–they will have more confidence in the company and work harder to do their part. (Maybe that’s one reason the folks at Zappos love it so much.)

Next time you’re at a party, listen for The Echo. You’ll hear it.

Despite my somewhat iffy results with my recent decision to put the Law of Attraction to the test, I just want to say that I do believe that faith works.

And I believe it works so, so well.

And that’s what I want to write about today.

So – what do I mean by “faith works”? Well, I mean a lot of things. First, I mean that when you change yourself internally, your external circumstances are bound to change, too, right along with your insides.

And there’s more. In this post, which is Part Two of a series called “Why Faith Works,” I’m going to talk about another reason faith “works,” namely, it changes your expectations.

When I’m feeling really happy, I’m not expecting negativity from others. Instead, I’m expecting that everything will be fine, and no one will treat me poorly no matter what kind of mood they happen to be in.

I think differently about them, which causes them to pick up on that–and makes them treat me better.

We’ve all witnessed this at some point. You’re in the line at the supermarket and everyone seems bored or hurried. You, though, are smiling and feeling fine. Suddenly, you find that you’ve attracted a few extra smiles to yourself–and they seem like grateful ones, too.

When I was depressed, I saw depressed people everywhere. Now that I’m happy, I see happy people everywhere. It’s kind of like how when I was single, I saw bad guys everywhere, whereas now that I’m married I see only great ones.

Funny, isn’t it?

Faith does work. Try it, and see for yourself.

Lately I’ve been giving my personal mission statement (sorry for the cliché) a bit of thought, and this is what I’ve come up with:

1. Life is a game.
2. Happiness is a choice.
3. We have power.

“Life is a game,” to me, means that we chose our path and our meaning–no one chooses it for us.

“Happiness is a choice” means that we have the ability to change our thoughts and internal dialogue for the better.

“We have power” means that our ability to control our lives is far greater than any of us realize.

And all three statements together make, I think, a very good foundational philosophy. And that’s what I want to bring to this blog every day.

I hope it happens.

I know way, way too many people that aren’t happy.

What do you think of my “mission”? Leave your comments below!

My mother is an Evangelical Christian, and I love her. I guess if you were to really put the entirety of the first twenty-eight or so years of my spiritual quest—and life on earth, too, since I’ve been spiritually-minded basically from birth—into one concise statement, that would be it: My mother is an Evangelical Christian, and I love her, and she loves me too, and always has, and because of that, she taught me to be the same.

And so, largely because of who she was and also because of who I was and would’ve been anyway, with or without her, from elementary school on I sincerely loved religion. I was a serious child, and depressed, so even at a young age I looked to faith as my most reliable source of comfort and consolation. By the time I got to junior high, I depended on it just to get me through the day.

And it worked. What else can I say? It worked wonderfully well. Not only because it made me feel better, but also because it was real. In spite of some of the (major) shortcomings of my ideology, I still believe that God really was there for me all that time I was growing up, helping me navigate my sometimes complicated, sometimes overwhelming inner life. Why do I believe this? For one thing, I remember very clearly some of my encounters with what I can only imagine to be the Divine.

Sometimes when people wonder how anyone can believe that there is only one way to heaven, and only their religion is true, I think about the time when I was four or five years old, and my mother prayed for me to “receive tongues,” and how the next thing that I remember was waking up from a kind of coma and speaking audibly and very rapidly in a language I’d never heard before. Or the way I felt when my typical adolescent malaise was pierced clear through very suddenly one evening at a prayer meeting, causing me to kneel down on the floor in front of my mother, who was also kneeling, and tell her over and over how much I loved her. Or the time in high school when I went to a weekend youth camp and repented of my sins and then, upon returning, for the first time that I could remember, having no depression at all, and instead, for days afterward, feeling a calmness and peace that made me feel like I was floating.

Of course, experiences like these couldn’t last forever (or so I then thought); each day following the youth retreat, for example, that peace faded a little more even though I tried to prolong its presence by reading the bible and praying more than usual. I was disappointed when these experiences were over, but I never forgot them, and they gave me the strength to get through high school, the most difficult time of my life.

They also utterly convinced me of the truth of my beliefs. If Christianity weren’t true, I thought to myself, why does it work so well for me?

These days, I’m still utterly convinced that those experiences were truly divine and truly inspired. But I no longer believe they had anything to do with my being a Christian except that as such, I made myself open to them.

After all, why would God be limited by my ideas of him?

In any case, for a very long time I was a Christian, and a good one. It wasn’t until I reached my late twenties that this began to change. Well, actually, this had begun to change much sooner than that, but I wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge the change, or its consequences, completely.

I won’t go into all the details of why I ceased to be a practicing Christian, then ceased to consider myself a Christian at all (something that only happened just recently). I have written about these events in other books, and I wouldn’t want to repeat myself too much here. Suffice it to say that the story is predictable. It involves a liberal arts education, a divorce, and a man that I love. What I will tell you about, though, is the final chapter in my life as a Christian, the events of which played out only a short time ago.

It was the year 2011. In November of that year, I gave birth to an absolutely perfect little girl. Her name was Jane, and she died in my arms four days later.

My story of the events surrounding her death, called What I Learned from Jane, goes into the details. What’s important for my purposes here is that after Jane died, my life was never the same. I started reading spiritual books one after the other, books that had nothing to do with Christianity, books that would in fact be more properly placed in the New Age category of the store. I started meditating (though, as you may have already guessed, I never was very good at it). I started saying affirmations. I watched the movie The Secret and learned about the law of attraction. I started a blog about spirituality called Stories and Truth. I asked people questions.

I began to search.

Here are some of the new ideas about spirituality I eventually decided to embrace:

•“Salvation” for all. I now have a great peace knowing that I—and even better, the people I love—are all going to what I once called heaven, a place of utter and eternal perfection.

•Reincarnation. This belief is one of my favorites, though when I was a Christian I thought it was downright silly. I now believe that I—and, yes, the people that I love—can’t screw up our lives in any permanent way (or any way at all, really). We all get another chance, and another, and another—and as many as we want after that.

•Oneness with God. We are divine. We are all one. We are God. These ideas, which also sounded entirely unlikely to me before, are the foundation of what I now see as the only logical spiritual perspective, almost to the point of being obvious (though allow me to say here that it’s not my goal to convince you of the same).

•Amorality. There is no ultimate meaning to life; life is only what you make of it, what you decide that you want it to be. (I explain this idea at length in another short book called Happiness Is the Truth: A Spiritual Manifesto.)

•The power of thought. Thoughts are prayers. They are our way—our only way, if you include feelings and beliefs in the same category—of communicating what you—a God, or a part of God—want to have happen in your life. (If this idea is unfamiliar to you, I recommend more exploration—very profound stuff.)

This, then, is the greatly abbreviated version of my current theology and the events that led to my adoption of it.

That’s right: I am now a heathen.

Someday soon, I’m going to learn how not to overeat. That is my challenge for right now. And I’m going to succeed.

Now, don’t get me wrong; this challenge is a difficult one. But it is just one, after all. I am not attempting to fix all of my flaws at the same time—partly because I know that would be impossible, and partly because I don’t even know what all of them are.

But this one I know about. This is the one that’s affecting me the most right now. This is the one that due to the perspective granted me by our presently experienced time-space continuum looms the largest, like a big old punching bag standing directly in front of me on my path to wherever it is I’m trying to go.

It’s large, yes—it’s one of those wide rectangle ones that take up more than the necessary amount of space. Even more than that, though, it’s ugly. It is crass, and gaudy, contrasts sharply with the natural beauty of the trees and bushes surrounding me. It even has a face painted on it, a red, evil-looking clown face, to signify the personal nature of its attack. But here’s the thing: It isn’t an army. It isn’t even a real human being.

It is just a crazy-colored clown punching bag, and it is only one.

Also—and here’s the really cool part—also, when I get closer to it, examine it a little (though I’d rather at times look away), I realize that it isn’t even a real punching bag at all. It is actually just a balloon. And when I punch it for the first time, it easily yields to my effort.

I laugh. I can do this, I think. I really can do this.

All it took was for me to finally decide that I would.

A habit, then, is nothing. It is just a decision or, at most, a long series of decisions—a big one followed by lots of little ones, but none that are hard to make alone. All it takes is to lift your arm and swing. And so, here is the secret for breaking an entrenched habit: as long as you keep trying, it is impossible to fail.

As long as your decision remains always the same, success is guaranteed.