Monthly Archives: October 2007

A few days ago I had lunch with a friend of mine. I parked my car a block or so away from his house, and a couple of hours later I was heading back to my car to drive home. I went to the spot where I was sure I’d parked, but my car was nowhere to be found. My heart stopped. I walked up and down that section of street where I’d parked. I felt the panic start to well up as it hit me that, obviously, my car had been stolen. What was I going to do? I started thinking about whether I’d left anything valuable in the car. How would I get home? I couldn’t believe this was happening.

After walking up and down the same carless stretch of street for several minutes, all I knew to do was to go back to my friend’s house, so I turned and started walking in that direction. Just as I rounded the corner where I thought I’d parked, and headed back to his house, I saw my car. It was right there on the part of the street where I’d obviously left it. I had walked right past it, either not paying attention or convinced for some reason that I’d parked somewhere else.

It was as if the car had been invisible and then somehow, it had materialized right in front of me. I’m sure passersby were wondering why this guy was out on the street hugging a Pontiac.

Later I was wondering to The Team about the incident and my wildly fluctuating responses . . .

This is a perfect example of something that you do so often in so many less obvious or dramatic ways. You go looking for something–in some cases it may be something that feels lost to you, or maybe just something you want but either can’t remember where it is or can’t figure out how to obtain it . . . You search and search . . . you feel yourself getting more and more worried or afraid or stressed about where it is . . . . how to find it . . .

You mind races, your heart races . . . your body responds to this surge of negative emotion that is always—always—telling you that you’re looking in the wrong place or that you’re trying too hard or that what you want is not in the direction that you’re facing.

Then—when you’re ‘lucky’—you somehow manage to turn around. Something else distracts you or catches your eye. Your attention shifts for some reason to something else that feels better, that feels like relief to you . . . For whatever reason, you surrender. You give up your striving to force the thing you want to appear. You cancel the search. You may throw up your hands in what you call defeat. You release the last bit of resistance you have to insisting, demanding, NEEDING what you think you need to be there in that moment.

And in that moment of surrender, of letting go, of even forgetting what you think you needed to be . . . what you wanted suddenly appears. There it is. Right where it was all the time . . . . waiting for you to see . . . really see . . . waiting for you to really open your eyes and recognize that what you wanted was never lost . . . that what you want is always there, waiting for you to receive it . . . waiting for you to stop fighting and stressing and striving so hard to make it be.

We understand what a paradox . . . a conundrum this seems to be to you. You always scratch your head in bewilderment when that desired object appears. . . when your nearly forgotten dream manifests . . . when your lost keys materialize in the bowl on the table in the hallway where you are certain you did not leave them.

What we would most like you to understand about all this, is that there is so much, so much of the time, that you are not seeing . . . so much of what you are asking for is already there, right in front of you . . . but you are so busy looking elsewhere . . . or so convinced that you know better where it’s hiding when it’s not hidden at all . . . . it is simply not showing up on your screen because the movie you’re showing on that screen is one that doesn’t allow you to see it.

We harp on you so much about staying in a place of appreciation for what is . . . of giving your attention to the joy or satisfaction or fulfillment—the well being—that is always abounding all around you . . . because it is only in your recognition of that well being that your eyes are opened and you are able to truly see what you want . . . recover what you think you lost . . . receive what you’ve been looking and asking for.

Your car was waiting there for you, waiting for you to give up your determined search to find it where you were convinced it should be . . . The relief you felt—the joy you felt—when you saw it is the same relief, the same joy available to you every single time you remember—really remember—where you parked your true, blessed, bright, shining, view of you and all that is flowing around you.

It’s true. After I finished hugging my car, I had the sweetest drive home. The sun was shining. My car was purring like a kitten, obviously pleased that I finally stopped walking around in a frenzy and found her.

What was most striking to me was how quickly my mood changed, from panic-sricken and lost to thrilled and overcome with relief . . . . how the simplest act of recovering what I only thought was missing had taken me from lost to found in just seconds.

Something about that was so powerful . . . I’m still pondering it and wondering what else I might be missing . . . and what as yet unexperienced rushes of relief and discovery might be waiting for me, just around the corner where I thought I parked.

It leaves me wanting to keep my eyes—and my options—wider open, happy to be rolling merrily along on my much appreciated wheels, and feeling, for the moment, complete.

“I try my very best to stay positive,” a friend complained recently. “But it’s tough to do when everyone around me is so negative.” Another friend emailed, asking “What of the pessimistic mate? We are only so strong, and truth is, when it hits home, it is everyone’s issue. How can one person stand up against it?”

A tree doesn’t have to fall on me (as a rule) to recognize when there’s a good question afoot. So I asked The Shower Team, “What do we do about the naysayers we’re more or less stuck with? What’s a positive thinking, deliberate creation witch or wizard supposed to do when surrounded by mud-slinging, sourpussed muggles?

Our hearts do go out to those among you who are struggling so valiantly to make your way in the face of such adversity. The first thing we would recommend is getting to the root of the issue—which, of course, is you.

It may –or may not—help to recognize that not a single one of these negative thinkers in your midst could have come into your experience if they were not somehow a match to you. In other words, in this as in any other situation you find yourself in that doesn’t thrill you (and we know how much you love hearing this)—you did it and are continuing to do it to yourself.

So you might begin to address the situation at hand by first finding your way to acknowledging that “they” are not the cause of your discomfort because “they” could not be there bugging you if you had not somehow in some way (however unintentionally) invited them.

Be all that as it may, you are where you are—surrounded by the people who are around you. So, what to do or where to go from there is the question. More than likely you have already discerned that the approach of blaming those around you isn’t a winning strategy. No matter how justified you may be in observing and noting their negativity or their pessimism or their depression or despair or anger or frustration . . . the observing of ‘them’ in their negativity is only amplifying it and bringing you more of it. There you are doing your best to feel good, to reach for pleasing thoughts and to approach your life in a more positive manner, and there they are tripping you up every time and boy oh boy wouldn’t it just be so much better for you if they would stop doing what they do that so gets under your skin?

You manage to really squeeze yourself in between the rock and the hard place as you continue to use ‘them’ as your excuse for not feeling good. But the good news is, there’s an easy escape. You can start to take the pressure off right away by remembering the only thing that there is to remember in order to find relief: that nothing—and no one—is more important than that you feel good.

We realize this is still considered heresy in most human circles, but we’ll keep saying it anyway because you can’t really do anything to us—and because it’s true. In this area—in your relationships to one another—you are so prone to getting stuck in your drive to justify your feelings. Being “right” becomes more important than feeling good and you will sometimes stubbornly persist in your demands that someone else alter their behavior in order for you to feel good, that you will forego all manner of well being in the process.

You essentially decide that you can only be happy if or when those around you permit it. You decide that your happiness is contingent upon their actions or their approval or their willingness to go along with you in whatever way you feel that they should.

“But it’s hard,” you say, “when ‘they’re’ all so gloomy or critical or cynical . . . “ “How am I supposed to be happy around that??”

We get that you want some magic to transform this condition according to your will, and so here it is. Decide what’s more important to you: how you feel, or how they act. If your choice is how they act, you’re on your own. But if feeling good is REALLY what is most important to you, then put your money where your mouth is. Be picky about how you feel. Decide that no matter what is going on or being said around you, that you have the power to choose what you focus on. You have the power to attend to or to ignore anything happening in your experience. You have the power to choose your response to any stimulus. You have the ability to observe selectively—to dwell on this while skipping over that . . .

You hear these words and immediately you argue that such advice is unrealistic or even impossible. You are willing to suffer all manner of unhappiness in order to prove that this can’t be done rather than deciding to really find out for yourself. But whether you choose to exercise it or not, you always—always—have the freedom to choose what you give your attention to in others as in your own thoughts and experiences.

Oh—and here’s the magic part—as you begin to choose your well being, your happiness, your joy over anything else in every situation . . .. then you begin to establish for yourself a dominant mood or mindset or vibration that is less and less a match to the negativity that you used to attract.

In other words, as you begin to change YOU . . . as you begin to fashion a you who is more aligned with the YOU who appreciates, the You who values others, the You who sees only the best in others, the You who gives attention only to the good in others . . . then you become more and more YOU . . . and in the process, you cannot help but attract what is like YOU. So those around you will either respond by showing you only what is a match to the new and
improved you. Or—they’ll hit the road.

So, once again, it’s the broken record of being all about you. But hey—you asked.

Well someone’s pretty full of Themselves. I would love to put up a fight here but as a former champion (and still a contender) heavyweight blamer of others for my bad mood, I’m afraid I don’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Although I sometimes hate to acknowledge Their bullseyes, I have so often caught myself in that rock and a hard place of convincing myself how right everything would be if those around me would just cooperate or even cheer up. Can’t people see how hard I’m working to be perky?

But this trick about selective focusing as a technique for conjuring up better ambience . . . now that’s intriguing. Brings out the magician in me. Now I see sourpusses—now I don’t! Sounds pretty cool and a helluva better approach than my usual pouting.For now it leaves me feeling like I’ve got the power—or at least, the AC adapter. And that leaves me feeling a little more charged up—and for the moment, complete.