I don’t often eat junk food. (For me, a bowel of Raisin Bran is an indulgence.) However, after having my third baby, Jack, in a difficult delivery, then seeing him head straight to the NICU for a four-day stay (he’s fine, thankfully), I decided a little treat was in order.
I’m going to buy myself a Snicker’s bar, I thought. Or not. We’ll see if I get around to it.
The next day, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: a candy dish by the front counter of the maternity ward, and in it several miniature Snickers bars. Well, it has to be a sign, I thought.
What does being in a continuous state of meditation, the kind I talk about in You’re Getting Closer, actually feel like? Well, it’s different for everyone, I’m sure. For me, lately, it feels like there’s a large basin in front of me, right at waist-level, filled with ice-cold, beautiful, pure water. Whenever I need to feel refreshed–or just whenever I think about it–I dip my hands into the water and drink from it or splash it on my face.
I say my mantra. I feel the body within, as Tolle says to do.
Reminder to anyone who missed it that The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home is now available on Amazon.com here.
And one more excerpt for you:
“It’s a strange fact but a fact nonetheless: most people greatly underestimate the effect of their environment on their mood and enjoyment of life.
“I don’t know why this is. Shouldn’t we have figured it out by now? We pay three times the normal price of wine, just so we can drink it on an uncomfortable stool in a sexy, cool bar. We do the same with coffee at Starbucks. And we spend a whole load of cash to sit by a pool in Mexico, rather than the one at the Y.
“We think we have other reasons for doing these things, reasons that are much more logical and detached. The bar is convenient. Starbucks has free Wi-Fi. And in Mexico you can scuba dive or ride a horse.
“But home is convenient. Home has the internet, and there are bodies of water and horses here, too. We don’t go for any of that; we go because we want to get away.
Our homes can’t give us that getaway experience, of course, but they can offer something even better: an ongoing sense of well-being in our everyday life.
“Allow me to say again what I said in chapter one: Your home is like a person—and, like a person, it has a soul.”
If you are a fellow home organization hobbyist, check it out. It has a ton of ideas for greatly simplifying your life.
Lately, it’s been all about the mantra for me. I decide on one I like in the morning, then say it all the day long.
I love mantras, and yet–the mantra is not really the thing. It’s not the main thing, the reason for its own existence. Instead, the mantra is only as good as the feeling that I get as I say it.
Lately, my primary spiritual practice–my way of staying “in the vortex”, in continuous communication with the Divine, or whatever you want to call it, has been to repeat a mantra all day long. The common technique gets a twist, though–several, actually:
The mantra is “custom-made”–something I came up with that very day or week that feels *just right* for what I’m going through, and feels exceptionally good.
After saying my mantra, I count. Example: “I have power. One. I have power. Two.” Don’t know why I like doing this, but I really, really do.
One day when I was in high school, I had a strange experience. It happened, really, during a family counseling session at which a wonderful Christian woman prayed for me at length. The prayer was for friendship and a feeling of acceptance, and immediately, I felt the effect.
Here’s the thing: in high school, I had almost no friends, and very little self-confidence, either. The mantra in my brain everyday went something like this: people don’t like you, so don’t even try.
Well, that day, and totally supernaturally, the intent of that woman to help me must have broken through my own intent to be miserable, and the result was truly amazing: I felt like a socially accepted and acceptable person–and the next day, I started making friends.
That day in class, the teacher had us write evaluation notes to each other. That’s all we did the whole period–write evaluation notes, and receive and read them. Well, of course after a while this just became a note-passing free-for-all, and somehow, in the midst of this, I started noticing something: people were treating me differently. They were including me. They were complimenting me.
I finally felt like one of them.
By the end of the class period, a few of us even exchanged phone numbers.
I was sad when the next day the new-found confidence faded. I didn’t know that there was anything I could do to get it back.
One day, I hope to teach my children the lesson of that day, namely: when you shift inside, circumstances shift around you, too–and sometimes in a pretty speedy way.
In How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, David Hamilton tells the story of a patient named Linda who was diagnosed with colon cancer.
After the diagnosis, she began the healing visualizations Hamilton suggested, plus began taking better care of her body.
“I regularly have scans, and each time the results are the same: no sign of cancer in my body,” Linda said. She reports being full of vitality these days–even more so than before the diagnosis.
How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body is available on Amazon.com.
When I was in high school, I received a message from God via a friend of my mom’s who, like both of us, was an Evangelical Christian. While praying for me one day she prophesied that as an adult I’d become a world traveller, going to China, India, Africa and other exotic places like that.
At the time, hearing this was a big help to me. It gave me something to look forward to, something to help me get through my worse-than-mundane high school existence. I held on to the dream, and once I went to college, studied Mandarin Chinese–a language I still totally adore. After college, I did go to China, and later to India, and a whole bunch of other cool places, too. Africa is one of the next on my list, and I don’t think it will be too long before I get there.
To this day, I’m not sure if the prophecy that woman gave me was really from God . . . but something in me responded to it deeply, and that made it a powerful motivator and point of focus in my life (and at a time when I needed one badly).
Last month, I paid off the mortgage for one of my homes.
It’s the first home I bought, and when I did so I was a part-time waitress right out of college. I got myself a few roommates and pinched every penny. Without knowing how it could ever happen, I made a goal to pay off the mortgage in ten years.
The day I signed the papers was Friday, January 13–just over nine years ago.
So, how did I make this happen? Well, I worked hard, of course–but even that couldn’t possibly have guaranteed such an outcome. I believe the biggest factor in this success is that I knew the house was the right one for me. It felt right buying it, and it felt right renting it out when I moved away. I loved the house then and still do, and each dollar I’ve put towards it was given with a sense of power, enjoyment and accomplishment.
If I had to sum it up in one word, I’d say the secret to this success story was gratitude.
When I was growing up–let’s face it, up to my mid-twenties–I was one of the shyest people I knew. I could just barely stand speaking in class. I hated standing out in any way–a comment on a new hairstyle, for instance, freaked me out–and I totally sucked at making friends.
Now, this was in my pre-New Thought awareness days, and yet it won’t surprise most of you to know that that didn’t stop me from succeeding in ridding myself of this mental alignment. After a torturous high school experience, while in my first year of college, I made a momentous decision: I decided to stop being shy.
My method: I would speak once a day in class.
I can’t remember if I succeeded in doing this every day or not. Since that semester, though, I have gradually worked my way through most of my shyness, so that today, most people who know me are shocked to learn I wasn’t always at least fairly comfortable around people.
And I even have a good number of friends now.
Sometimes, the intention is all we need to accomplish our goals. Other times, that’s just the beginning of the story. This was one of the latter kind, and yet–there was something miraculous about it, too.
Contributors: Mollie Player and How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body by David Hamilton
In How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, David Hamilton tells of a patient who had two very large warts on his feet, one of them almost the size of his big toe. Though he’d had them for several years, soon after he tried Hamilton’s visualization techniques, the warts completely disappeared. What hadn’t responded to any number of holistic and traditional healing approaches (including drugs), responded very quickly to his mind and beliefs.
For lots more stories like this one, get How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body on Amazon.com.
Roger Bannister was the first person to run a mile in under four minutes.
It happened in 1954, and until that time, no one believed it was possible. Running experts, physiologists, doctors–they all had “proof” that it couldn’t be done.
Until it was.
Most interesting to me, though: after Bannister accomplished this feat, he was followed by twenty-four other people . . . within just eighteen months.
“It’s as true of a blender as it is of a dog: things don’t cost what they cost. They cost what they cost to buy, maintain, move around and store. All these factors cost money (yes, space alone costs money: square footage is the number one factor in home price, and have you seen your heating bill lately?), but there are several other costs to consider, and both are more valuable than cash. The first is the cost of your time: the sheer number of minutes that add up to hours that add up to days that you spend rearranging, cleaning, protecting, and working around your stuff. And the second is the cost of your emotion . . .
“For the purposes of this book, the terms “bare” and “naked” aren’t so much about wearing no clothes as they are about wearing nothing that distracts from your beauty.
It is the total and complete absence of clutter.”
Contributor: My friend and fellow blogger Scott. Find more of his musings on spirituality, the law of attraction and more at kindredspirit23.wordpress.com.
Manifesting should not be work. It should be something that happens naturally when first you will it, then you follow through as needed. No, you don’t just express your desire to the universe and start running around to find it fulfilled. It’s quieter than that. I find that if I manifest and turn it over to God, it works out.
Example: My roof is leaking. The estimates I could gather for a new roof ranged from $4,000-$10,000.
I couldn’t afford that. I didn’t even know who to call. So, I manifested.
Later, I had to stop by the nursing home for what became my last therapy session. The PT suggested that I should see if it’s covered by my insurance. My deductible is $1000, so that still concerned me, but I had them send out someone to estimate. He was from a good, honest company.
An hour later, the person told me it wasn’t enough for a claim and it would be less than $1000 to fix it.
I knew it would still be a lot of money, but I felt much better. The company said they would even do payment plans!
However, when the estimate came back, it was just under $1200.
I hesitated; I felt the need to hesitate. My mom thought I should get a second estimate. I didn’t know who to call, so I put it out on Facebook.
I received several good answers, including one from my stepson who offered to do the job at cost. (Thankfully, we’ve always gotten along well.) This seems like the right opportunity, and now I’m waiting to see if it works out.
I feel confident that whatever happens will be fine and I no longer need to worry about the money.
The first (and only) time I visited New York City, something kind of funny happened: on the first street corner I came to by Grand Central, I understood what everyone was talking about.
The movies. The books. The people that wear those hats that say “I (heart) NY.”
It suddenly made perfect, total sense.
Some things simply cannot be captured, either in books or by a camera. New York City is one of them.
Quick post today to tell you about my latest book. It’s called The Naked House: Five Principles for a More Peaceful Home, and as you may have inferred from the title, it’s about home organization and simplification. Here is the back cover copy:
“The solution is almost always fewer things. That’s the Naked House philosophy in a nutshell, though the importance of top-notch organization (“a place for everything and everything in its place”), design unity, cleanliness and quality round out this book’s description of the most desirable, peaceful home in which to live. With a tongue-in-cheek, personal style, The Naked House is an inspiring but not-too-serious primer on cleaning, organizing and reducing clutter—and on changing the way you view the purpose and soul of your home.”
Lots of times, law of attraction believers talk about the importance of inspired action–and there is good reason for that. Jane Roberts, the woman who back in the 1970s channeled the spirit entity who called himself Seth, wrote about this idea a lot. The subconscious, she said, is where all the work gets done, while the role of the mind is to be still and wait for instruction.
I like this idea a lot, of course; who doesn’t want the Universe to give them personalized, detailed advice? Which is why it was so exciting to me when recently I saw the principle at work.
Here’s the story: I have two children, and one is almost brand new. Since the other is only two and a half, it made sense for a dedicated walker like me to buy a stroller that could hold them both; it’s one of the first and only purchases I considered for the new baby when pregnant.
And yet, I did not buy a stroller.
I can’t say exactly why I didn’t. I knew it was necessary. I knew if I wanted to get a good used one, I probably shouldn’t wait till the last minute. But it wasn’t until one fine spring afternoon about a month before the baby was born, following a trailside near-breakdown of my rickety old thrift store contraption that, during a conversation with a friend at the playground, it hit me: “I want to buy a double stroller–and I want to buy one right now.”
The desire really did feel inspired.
That night, I shopped around online, ready to hit the “buy” button at any moment . . . but nothing was calling my name. Nothing, that is, except The One–the $600 double stroller straight from heaven. With no real desire to buy it new, and realizing I’d probably find a used one nearly as good for pretty cheap, I decided to hit a thrift store soon and settle on anything that was similar.
Two days later, while out with my son, I was intrigued to see the exact stroller I had lusted after, sitting outside a McDonald’s restroom. In true motherly fashion, I complimented the owner, struggling to wash three sets of hands, on her tasteful choice of transportation.
“You wouldn’t be interested in selling it, would you?” I asked–and when she answered I knew God had spoken.
“Actually, I do plan to sell it. Are you interested?”
$175 and a park date later, I brought my old stroller to the thrift store from which I’d bought it three years back.
As I handed it over to the attendant, I didn’t even feel sentimental.
I had the smooth-riding luxury SUV of strollers now . . . and I still thank God for it every time I take a walk.
When I was growing up my favorite movie was Anne of Green Gables. The way I felt when I was watching it–or at least the way I remember feeling–was just so thoroughly good, so entirely removed from all things uncomfortable. For a while, I too lived on a beautiful farm and no matter how misunderstood I was, I always had a best friend, beauty, and a book.
Now I’m all grown up, and though I much prefer most of my life the way it is now, I do have one complaint: In order to feel that good again, I have to meditate.
