When I think about it now, it seems pretty sudden. On my thirtieth birthday, I was recently separated from my first husband, living in the spare bedroom of an ant-infested, cat-run house on the wrong side of El Paso. I was only a month in to my writing career, working at a small ad agency for less money than I’d made as a part-time waitress. I had no friends, no car, no television and no family within several hundred miles. Yet somehow, four years later, four days after my thirty-fourth birthday, I was lying in a hospital in one of the wealthiest suburbs of Seattle, giving birth to a surprisingly good-looking and perfectly healthy baby boy, Xavier. My home, which I lived in with my new husband, David, was down the street from the Microsoft world headquarters in a neighborhood that boasts the best schools, the best parks. I had a small group of friends, and my writing career was everything I wanted it to be. I was running my own business, and I was succeeding.
Four years. That’s how long it took for everything to shift.
Xavier was born a year to the day after Jane was born, and in the years following his birth, the circumstances of my life continued to improve. Newly indoctrinated with New Age philosophy, I began to credit not just luck and hard work with the turnaround. Surely, the power of the mind was at work here, too.
Wasn’t it?
The law of attraction isn’t a particularly intelligent-sounding theory; to many, it sounds pretty silly. In spiritual circles debates over the exact mind-over-matter equation abound, but I won’t get into any of that here. I’ll just note that almost every modern non-Judeo-Christian spiritual teacher discusses the idea, whether or not they use the now-unfashionable term. We laugh about the book The Secret and it’s materialistic promises. But Matt Kahn, Eckhart Tolle and even Byron Katie mention similar ideas. They don’t make it their focus, but all of them and many others, including whole Eastern religions, believe in the mind’s ability to radically, even wholly, affect one’s life circumstances.
But even if you don’t love the idea (I get it, believe me), it’s hard to deny that people have power. We have the power to change our circumstances directly. The power to change our beliefs about those circumstances. And sometimes–maybe more than sometimes–we get a law of attraction-type superpower, and we get to change our circumstances by changing our beliefs alone, no special action required.
That’s a lot of power.
So why do we so often forget it’s there?
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