Lesson 4: The Momentum of Thought
When you hold onto a thought for any length of time, it begins to attract related thoughts — it begins to build momentum. This means that whenever you hold onto the energy of a thought, it will very quickly influence your mood. If you do this over time, it influences your beliefs, your actions, and everything that’s around you. Thus, in order to understand and apply The Law of Attraction, it’s essential for you to gain control over the direction and momentum of your thoughts. I think the easiest way to see this is to think about any time you’ve been in a neutral or positive mood, and for whatever reason saw or heard something that triggered a negative thought. Even though that thought was fleeting, and even though you were in a good mood, you might’ve found that your mind returned to the same doubt or negative thought. If you allow it to continue to do that; if you allow it to continue to rest in that doubt or fear, it can very quickly take over your vibration (and your mood), and it can turn what might’ve been a good day into a bad day…very quickly. It’s essential that you learn to catch the direction and the momentum of negative thoughts early, before they begin to spin out of control. That’s exactly what many of the exercises we’re working with are designed to do. Becoming Aware of Momentum
You want to train yourself to become aware of how every single thought impacts your vibration. Train yourself to become aware of the direction and the momentum of each thought. That might sound like a lot of work, but you can develop it as a habit, so it becomes second nature. You can develop it to the point where you don’t really “think” about what you’re doing, it just becomes part of your way of being. When you can start to realize that every single negative thought impacts you negatively, then you can catch those thoughts sooner, and redirect them into a positive spiral and a positive vibration. This is what I mean when I talk about following your highest joy. It means following that train of thought that feels a little bit better, and a little bit better, and a little bit better. That’s all there is to it. Finding The Best-Feeling ThoughtExercise: Hold a Thought for 10 Seconds Every MinuteThe post Lesson 19 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-19
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Lesson 5: Closing the Vibrational Gap
In Module 2, we introduced the Law of Vibration, and talked about how it is bringing you everything according to the energy that you hold. Whatever it is that you want exists at some other state of vibration. This means that all you have to do is match that level of vibration in order to experience it. There’s a great iChing quote that emphasizes this: “To have anything we want, we need only raise our level of consciousness to the level of consciousness where what we want exists.” – Wu Wei, I Ching I call this process closing the vibrational gap, because every desire simply reflects the distance that you have to move vibrationally. It represents the change in frequency that you, as an individual, need to experience in order to have the experience of the desire. You Are Abundant In Orange Juice
The last time you ran out of orange juice, what did you do? You probably didn’t fret about it. You didn’t worry you would never have orange juice again, that there was a global orange juice shortage, or that you would never have your favorite thing (your one true passion) ever again. You probably didn’t even notice. You probably just naturally bought groceries and got more orange juice. It’s simple. You didn’t go sit and meditate on it. You didn’t reflect on it all day thinking: “I don’t have orange juice. i don’t have orange juice. I don’t have orange juice.” This is something that’s really small — it’s a stupid-simple example — but it reflects the idea of how closing the gap from not having orange juice to having orange juice is so tiny you don’t even notice how you make the step. You’re naturally abundant in orange juice; you’ve had it your whole life, and you always expect it will be there for you. Now, contrast that example with something that feels like a bigger issue in your life. Notice how your thoughts and beliefs are formed around that issue. Chances are, if you’re trying to get out of desperate financial straights, or you’re trying to get over a health issue or a relationship issue or whatever it is, that you worry about the issue. You see it as being a big deal, and you spend a lot of time fretting about it, thinking about it in a negative way, and creating resistance about it. It’s not as easy as going to the grocery store to get more orange juice. It feels less natural. The point to realize is that you are the one who determines whether it is easy or hard, small or big, and whether or not you can have it. Combining The Laws of Vibration and Attraction
You have to understand that The Law of Attraction is constantly dictating your circumstances, and The Law of Vibration is a reflection of your current perspective. When you understand this connection you can realize that every second of every day, you have the ability to shape your perspective. You have the ability to leverage The Law of Attraction — by paying attention to the direction and momentum of your thoughts — into a better feeling state, a higher vibrational perspective. That, over time, will allow you to change your experience and change your circumstances. This is why it is so fundamentally important to take the time to step back — the practice we’ve been emphasizing throughout the course. Take the time to flow with the energy, to practice paying attention to your thoughts, and connecting how you think to how you feel. That’s what’s going to make the difference in how you live your life. Module RecapWe’ve covered a ton of material in this module, and I know that these concepts can be somewhat abstract, so I want you to take the time to go back and re-watch every single video from this module, making sure you understand every point that’s made. There are three key points I want you to takeaway that arc throughout the module. The first, is that The Law of Attraction operates according to the energy you become. It’s not about what you think, it’s about the energy, the vibration, that you hold behind each thought. When you pay attention to your emotions, you begin to pay attention to how The law of Attraction manifests in your life. The second is that the Law of Attraction is impartial. it will bring you your energy, regardless of whether that energy is good or bad. It does not know what you want; it knows how you feel. The third is that the process you want to focus on is a process of closing the vibrational gap, of moving from where you are to the state of energy — the state of consciousness — in which your desire exists. You do this by leveraging The Law of Attraction and the momentum of thought. Train yourself to pay attention to the direction and momentum of thought and you can gain control over that momentum, thereby gaining control over your entire vibration and your entire experience. The post Lesson 20 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-20 Lesson 3: Attracting Your Desires
Remember: most people go through their life focused on the physical, which means they’re looking at the things that are or are not present in front of them. More often than not, this means they’re looking at the absence of their desire, which keeps them stuck. So long as you continue to focus on the fact that the thing that you want is not yet present to you, you keep your energy (your vibration) down. This keeps you away from experiencing the desire you want, and you reinforce lack. You reinforce the absence of everything you want. This is why the shift in perspective to energy is so fundamental, because when you can shift your energy to the feeling of the desire, the desire has to show itself to you. You have to experience it, because you hold the energy of it. An Impartial Law
It doesn’t know the difference between what you want and what you don’t want. It only knows the energy that you hold. It can only bring you corresponding energy for your dominant state of being. The way this often plays out for a lot of people is that when they start to play with LOA and start to apply it to their lives they don’t see the results they expect. Then they think The Law of Attraction doesn’t work. They don’t realize that the law is working, it just isn’t working the way they think it’s working. For example, someone might try to relieve financial pressure by attempting to manifest a million dollars in a week, or they might try to cure a chronic health issue in the span of a couple of weeks. Even though they direct their thought to it and begin to focus on it and try to improve their vibration about it, they don’t realize they have decades of negative energy and resistance going up against them, and that it’s unlikely they’d be able to clear that resistance in such a short span of time. Thus they see The Law of Attraction “not working,” but in actuality it’s bringing them exactly the energy that they hold, they’re just not fully aware of how to control their energy quite yet. No Big or Small Aims
If you believe that something is a big deal, that it’s going to be hard, challenging, and take a long time, that is the energy you hold, and thus it’s the energy that you’ll see reflected in your physical circumstances. Thus the thing you want to achieve will be hard, it’ll be challenging, and it’ll take a long time. On the other hand, if you believe it’ll be easy, it will come really easily for you. You can leverage this fact by beginning to pay attention to the things that you want in relation to how you feel they might come about. Do you feel like they’re going to come easily, or do you feel like they’re going to be difficult? Whatever belief you hold about it, that’s the experience that you’ll have as you go about trying to manifest it. Exercise: Easy and Hard are Self-Reinforcing
I want you to create a list of a couple of things that you’re really good at and that you believe and know you’re really good at, along with a couple of things you’re really bad at, with which you always struggle and have to try really hard to do. Then, I want you to look over the list and think back on how every example in your life follows the belief you hold about each item on the list. The things you believe will come easy for you, always come easily for you. The things you believe will be challenging or that you’re not good at, always take that form. I think that this is easy to see when you compare it to a close friend. I think probably everyone has had an experience where they’re good at one thing and bad at another, while a friend is exactly the opposite. If not a friend, maybe a coworker or the way a team has been put together. It isn’t that one person is intrinsically smarter or better than the other, it’s just that they hold different beliefs about the way in which they operate. They have different understandings about how those beliefs will come into play. As you reflect on this, you can start to realize that there are no realistic or unrealistic aims, just as there are no fixed abilities or inabilities. You can start to see how your beliefs then shape what is or is not possible for you in your life. The post Lesson 18 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-18 Lesson 1: The World You Attract
Before we go further, I want to quickly review a few of the main principles from that module. The first is that your entire experience is a vibration, including yourself. You are constantly emitting a vibration and whenever you perceive a situation you do not like, the process of changing that situation is one of moving from the frequency where you currently are to the one in which you would prefer to be. You do this by changing your energy and changing your emotional state. The second key point to realize is that your thoughts are powerful creators. They hold an incredible impact over your individual experience of the world around you and how that world responds to the actions that you take. Finally, I want to emphasize that the key to changing your frequency — to moving from one state of vibration to another — is to leverage the thought-belief-emotional spectrum. These three areas, when taken together, form the seat of your power and the seat of your influence over your attitude, your vibration, your frequency, and how the world responds to you. We’ll be looking at each of these areas in more detail over the next few modules as well. Again, if any of these topics sounds unfamiliar, I encourage you to go back to Module 2 and revisit any of the videos you need in order to get a quick refresher before continuing on. No New Skill
Everything you have ever done, every experience or circumstance you have ever faced, has been the results of the concepts we’re talking about in this course. You simply weren’t aware that you were using this law naturally. I think that’s important because it takes a lot of the effort out of the equation. You don’t have to struggle in order to try to use this law, all you have to do is to become conscious — to become aware — of how it’s being applied in your life, and thus how you can use it to work with it, rather than against it. To think about this, I like to think about the analogy of gravity. Gravity has always been present in your life, even from when you were a little toddler and first struggling to walk (and struggling against gravity) for the first time. At that point, you didn’t know that there was this thing called gravity. Later on, someone taught you that, and if you continued in the study of science, you learned formulas about it and eventually how to apply it to real-world constructs. Thus we can fly around the world and send satellites into orbit. The point is that The Law of Attraction exists in much the same way. Everyone uses it. Some people are aware that they use it, while others are not aware they use it. Very few people are able to consciously take the steps that they need in order to control it and gain mastery over it in a practical way throughout their everyday life. That’s the point I hope to get you to throughout the rest of this course. You Are Already Attracting
You can realize this intellectually, academically, before you actually realize it experientially, but it’s important to take that experiential step, to start to become aware of the fact that you are already attracting everything that you experience to you. This is a major step that you will take. A lot of people, when they first start to hear about The Law of Attraction and become familiar with the concept, still think of the idea in terms of: “Oh, I need to work to attract the things that I want.” They don’t make the connection that even when they have the things they don’t want, that they are still attracting them. This means they don’t take responsibility in the way that they could were they to more fully recognize that concept. This is really important because as you start to experience — not just to know, but to experience — The Law of Attraction in your day to day life, you will begin to feel responsible for every single thing that happens to you. This is a major milestone in your journey from victim to creator consciousness, which is something we’ll talk about more in the next module on beliefs. For now, simply begin to reflect on ways in which The Law of Attraction is already active in your life, both the good and the bad. Exercise: Are You A Victim?
I don’t mean this in the traditional sense. I don’t mean taking responsibility for your actions (though that may certainly be a part of it), but rather taking responsibility for your vibration. I want you to reflect on how every detail of the circumstance was your own creation. Reflect on how your thought, belief, and emotional patterns led you into that situation and led to whatever consequence or result came out of it. I know this can be difficult if you’ve never been through this process before. If you find this exercise challenging, there are two tips you can use to help with it. The first is to try to look at events that were further in the past. Sometimes it helps to have a long timespan between the event and the recognition of all of these forces that came into play with it. Sometimes when something happened just last week or last month, you don’t necessarily have the perspective you need to see how all of the different factors played out, so look further into the past to see if that helps you to gain responsibility. The second is to look not just at the big things, but at the little things. Sometimes we’re so involved in the major dillemas and major life dramas that we experience, that we can’t view them objectively. If that’s the case, try looking for an example of a more minor situation, perhaps one that doesn’t really matter, so that you can play with it. Remember, the idea is always to have fun with these exercises. The idea is not to give yourself a complete psychological evaluation and see how you’ve created everything bad in your life. The point is to start to play with looking at how this energy is already at work, and to start to become more consciously aware of it. That’s a major first step in order to then be able to control it in the future. Exercise: Identifying Patterns of Thought
For this exercise, I want you to play with the thought of something that you want. It can be something you’ve wanted for a while, or something whimsical you come up with right now just for the purpose of the exercise. I want you to play with looking at what attitudes you hold, what thoughts, beliefs, and emotions do you hold about that subject, that might be keeping you from experiencing the desire you want? What is it that’s holding you back? You can think about this in terms of your personal action, but I strongly encourage you to think about it in terms of the energy behind that action. For example, there might be a specific step you need to take in order to achieve something — you might need to go work on a project — but rather than thinking about the action, think about why you haven’t yet done the work. What thought do you have that holds you back from it? What emotion do you have in relation to that step that you know you need to take? Try to do this exercise playfully. Try to make it fun. If it helps, pick a desire that isn’t the be all and end all for you, but is a secondary whim you want. That will help you to play with it a little more easily, without stressing that you need to master everything in your life in one day. The post Lesson 16 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-16 Lesson 2: From Thinking to Becoming
I want you to think of The Law of Attraction as a law of momentum and corresponding energy. This is where a lot of people go wrong when they first start to apply these concepts. They focus almost entirely on the physical, believing that if they think thoughts about the physical item they want, that the object will magically appear before them. I want to get you out of that mindset, and into the mindset of focusing on energy. The Law of Attraction only works to the extent that you can become the energy of the thought that you think. SImply thinking something will not help if you hold a more fundamental belief that it isn’t possible. The Law of Attraction becomes powerful when you can learn how to step into the feeling of energy, the emotional state, that is the essence of your desire, that is the essence your physical object symbolizes. We’ve already talked about this in the module on desires, so now it’s time to learn to apply it to things that are important to you. Thinking, Feeling, and Becoming
The first step is always to think the thought you want. This is where most people stop when learning to work with The law of Attraction. They think about their desire and begin to focus their attention more consistently on it. This is an excellent first step and I do not mean to disparage it any way. It’s absolutely fundamental, but it is only the first step. The next step is to actually feel into the desire. Start to feel the emotion, the passion, the excitement, behind the desire. This si what we talked about when we talked about recognizing the fact that physicality is a symbol and the fact that every desire has energy behind it. You need to tap into that energy, and tap into that emotion, in order to have it start to manifest for you. But, it’s really the third step where things start to take off, as you become that energy more consistently. You step into that feeling all day, every day. You allow yourself to become the idea you want to uphold, to become the energy of the thing that you want. That’s when you gain control over your physical reality. Become Consistently The Energy You Want
The first is that thoughts have their own momentum. This is what I mean when I say that The Law of Attraction is a law of momentum. Every thought tends to bring forth more similar, closely related thoughts. This applies to both good and bad thoughts. The first time that you think something, it seem whimsical, or crazy, or radically out there, but as you continue to focus on that thought it gradually starts to seem more realistic and gradually becomes more and more a part of you. This is the process of moving from thinking to feeling to becoming, as you continue to repeat those thoughts and feel into the energy of them. The second point is to realize that in order for The Law of Attraction to work, you need to become the energy of your desire more consistently than you are the energy of the lack of your desire. This can feel challenging, because the very fact that you have the desire often means you’re starting off from a position of lack. You need to train yourself to be able to feel into that energy. You can do this through affirmations and creating beliefs about the thing you want, but I want to point out that the realize some people have success with this process and others fail has to do with connecting their thoughts and words with their energy and their emotions. Two people can use the exact same affirmation and it might appear to work for one and not for the other. For example, if you say, “I am abundant,” it will only work for you if you already believe you’re abundant. When you say that phrase it will trigger abundant thoughts. If you don’t fundamentally believe that, saying the affirmation is just paying lip-service, and could make you have the energy of not being abundant. It will trigger fears and thoughts of lack that you already hold. As you’re working with this process, it’s important that you find statements you believe. Find statements you can feel the energy, not statements that seem like they “sound correct.” MeditationExercise: Practicing Becoming a Thought
Start with your breath. Take the time to step back consistently, at least once an hour, but better two or three times an hour. Take the time to breathe, relax, and destress from whatever circumstance is in front of you. Then, take an additional 20-30 seconds to feel into your desire. Feel into the excitement of it, the passion of it, and why you want it in the first place. If this is difficult for you, play with using the meditation included in this lesson or one of the rampages we’ve already seen. When you’re first getting started with this practice, it might take you a couple of minutes in order to relax enough to feel into your desire. But, as you feel into it more consistently, it will become more approachable and accessible, and you’ll be able to tap into that energy in just a few seconds. Consistently, throughout the day, take the time to do this. Step back, and feel into the emotion of your desire. If you can’t feel into the idea of “success” with whatever desire you hold, feel into the idea of “motion towards,” of rapidly progressing along the path of your desire. The post Lesson 17 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-17 Lesson 5: Prosperity Is The Feeling of Abundance
It helps to understand that prosperity is the feeling of abundance. When you focus on the feeling of abundance, you experience prosperity in any form you can imagine. As we’ve already talked about, abundance isn’t about achieving health, wealth, or love, or any other specific form, but these states are often the natural result. Recognize that when you feel abundant, in that moment you are abundant. Prosperity, then, is simply the consistent experience of abundance, the consistent act of focusing onto the things you already have , onto the motion towards your desire, rather than the lack of it. When you consistently experience this idea, this feeling of abundance, prosperity will emerge. Every Moment’s Focus
In every moment, you either feel abundant or you don’t. you either feel the incredible rush of the motion towards your desire, or the stress and frustration of feeling blocked from it. It is this balance, this choice, that either propels you forward towards everything you want or keeps you forever trapped in a state of your desire being just out o reach. If you can focus on abundance and the feeling of prosperity, you can enter into the state of your desire and therefore experience it in this moment. Exercise: Correlating Feelings and Desires
The first step is to begin noticing how you feel in relation to the desires that you hold. Noticing that whenever you feel like you’re on-track and making progress towards your goals, you feel good. You feel abundant, prosperous, and know everything is working out for you. Contrast that state with the correlation of how you feel when you feel stress or anger in relation to a goal. You often feel blocked from it. When you’re stressed, you feel like things aren’t working out and that there’s always going to be another challenge or obstacle in your way. As you contrast these two states, notice how in most cases your physical circumstances probably haven’t changed very much. You’re probably experiencing more or less the same conditions, but in one example you feel incredible, and in the other example you feel terrible. Don’t try to force yourself into one state of being or another, just start to notice the correlation between them. Notice the correlation of feeling good and making progress towards a goal versus feeling bad and feeling blocked from a goal. Starting to notice this can help you to feel into the energy of your desire as you move through normal life. MeditationKey Success Habits
I want to remind you that the students who make the most progress are those who consistently remember to apply these exercises to their lives. This occurs in two ways:
That’s how you’re going to see the most progress and make the most out of this course. The post Lesson 15 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-15 Lesson 4: Desire and the Now
In this lesson I want to get into the relationship of how that desire — and our attitudes about desire — impacts our position on the Now-moment. It’s important to understand that desire is a form of energy, and in this Now-moment you are always experiencing energy. When you connect the two, and associate desire with desire being present right now, you gain control over the ability to experience anything you want. Perhaps the most important side effect of focusing on the lack of things in your environment is that it forces your energy outside of the current moment, when instead you want to focus more completely in the current moment. When we focus on lack — seeing things that aren’t there that we wish were there, or vice versa — we decide we need to take certain actions that we don’t really want to take. We abandon our joy. We abandon the natural abundance that is already within us, in order to try to achieve some future state. In other words, we abandon joy for the promise of it in the future. We abandon control over our own energy because we think it will be available to us later. Contingent Happiness
Even worse, is that often once we achieve the thing we set out for, we immediately set another goal beyond it, and push our happiness back further. Our happiness is always behind the achievement or attainment of that “next best thing.” This approach is completely backwards. There is lots of data that when we prioritize happiness first, the goal sought is achieved more easily. Furthermore, over time this approach of delaying happiness creates a negative psychological association with the act of desire, because we start to associate the things that we want only with the absence of them and the struggle it takes to get there. The pure, natural state of exuberant, joyful desire yields to feelings of expectation and disappointment and we unconsciously begin to associate the act of wanting things with the disappointment and the unhappiness that we have when we focus on lack. Thus, by focusing on lack, we block ourselves from abundance and we block ourselves from joy. Stepping into Pure Desire
All that you whenever you feel negative associations with your desire — whenever you are focused on the apparent lack of a desire that you want — is shift your focus back towards the desire itself. Whenever you feel yourself in a negative statement, try to remember to take a step back and refocus on what you want. Focus on why you want the desire, on how incredible it is, how joyful you are as you move towards that desire, etc. The more you can bring your focus in this moment to the act of attaining that desire, to the motion towards the desire, the more easily you can associate that desire with joy, and the more quickly it’ll move into your current experience. Exercise: Remembering True Desire
The second step is to notice what’s frustrating you. Draw your attention to whatever desire you hold in relation to that circumstance. Try to notice if what’s really frustrating you is the apparent lack of your desire in that moment. Then, remind yourself that every desire has at its essence a state of being, an emotion. Remember the feeling that is associated with the desire that you want in that circumstance, and take the time to try to feel into that emotional state. As you begin to focus more and more on that feeling, remind yourself that it is always the motion towards that you’re after. The physical circumstance is a symbol. Bring your attention back to the energy. Focus on the movement, the process, of moving in to that state of emotion that you’d prefer to feel in that circumstance. Finally, recognize that you are already experiencing this desire. As you bring your focus towards the motion, the movement of your energy from one state to another — moving from a state that you don’t prefer to a state that you do prefer — you are experiencing the energy of the desire. So long as you keep yourself in that state of experiencing the energy of the desire, it will come about in the physical world. Rampage: The Motion Towards
The post Lesson 14 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-14 Lesson 3: Joy For Its Own Sake
If that’s where you are, that’s ok, but at some point it becomes important to realize that following your joy IS the essence of your desire. Following your joy is the experience that you seek. Rather than looking to get over or get through some circumstance, with happiness and joy being a secondary consideration, try to focus more intently on the process of pursuing joy. In Module 2 we talked about how joy is important because it physically pushes your vibration higher. It literally moves you into a higher level of consciousness and a higher state of being. In this lesson it’s applicable because as you start to look at the symbolism of your desires and begin to look at the root origin of your desires, you will find that the root of all desire is to experience joy, bliss, love, peace, security, and passion. All of these concepts are interrelated. When you start to see every single desire as a desire to express or experience more joy-bliss-love-light, it becomes increasingly obvious that the only thing you need to do in any moment of any day is to find the thought or action that is the most joyful thought or action for you in that moment. The Motion Towards
The actual act of attaining your desire is always secondary. It hardly matters. It’s the motion towards that you want to focus on. If you think in this way, pretty soon you’ll start to realize that it is the process of becoming, of emerging into, and moving forward with a desire that IS this exhilarating experience, this feeling of passion and excitement, a thrilling exuberance that you can take to every single day. Moving towards your desire IS the essence of following your joy and experiencing the desire itself. Exercise: Create a “Happy List”
I call this my “happy list.” I encourage you to create a list of at least 10 things (but better if you have 20-30) that you can always count on to lift your mood. It helps if you divide this list into the amount of time that it takes and/or the space that you need to do it. For example, I like to keep my list in categories of things that take less than 1-2 minutes to do, things that take 5-10 minutes, and things that take 20-30 minutes. The list can include absolutely anything. The point is to develop actions that work for you. For example it might include: doing a few pushups, listening to music, doing a quick dance, sitting down for a long meditation, going for a walk, reading, etc. Include anything that always makes you feel better. The point is to have a list of things to do when you notice you ‘re feeling negative, so you can get moving and lift yourself out of that negative spiral. Having this list can jumpstart you into feeling good all of the time. Exercise: Moving in the Flow
I want you to practice moving for an entire day of just following your train of thought into better and better feeling states. Whatever you feel the inspiration, the impulse, to act on, you do. Whatever makes you feel good in that moment, you do. This might be getting up and going for a walk or a run, it might be sitting down and reading, it might be playing some music, or cooking. Anything that makes you happy, you do, but the point is that you don’t plan to do. You’re not planning your perfect day off, you simply plan a day in which you have absolute freedom and space to move with the inspiration you have in each and every moment. This might feel a little odd, perhaps even crazy at first, but it’s actually your most natural way of being. We’ve simply trained ourselves out of it; we’re used to relying on our minds to dictate everything that we do every day. Exercise Reflections and Recap
Notice if in the moments in which you felt complete happiness, utter exhilaration and passion throughout the day — in those moments you felt abundant, if you felt peaceful, if you felt a connection with the energy, the flow of life. Notice that trend. You may have glimpsed this state only for a second, but I do hope you glimpsed it. Even if in the next second you went back to the same old story of lack, or thinking you should be doing something, that’s ok, but I want you to realize that connection between happiness/passion/enthusiasm and abundance. In the moments when you feel joyful, you have everything that you need and everything that you want. This is the experience of abundance. The post Lesson 13 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-13 Lesson 2: The Energy of Desire
When you can open yourself to receiving the energy — the essence — of your desire in any form that it will come, without setting specific expectations to it, you open yourself to experiencing this energy in any form. Usually, you then experience it almost immediately. In order to experience a desire, all you need to do is to be receptive to experiencing it in any physical form that the desire might take. It is only when you begin to create expectation and set specific rules about how the desire needs to come to you or the exact way that it needs to look, that you limit yourself from experiencing that desire. Every desire that you hold, every goal or aim you have ever set for yourself, is a symbol of the energy you wish to experience. This is a really important point, because it means that desires are never about the thing that you think that you want. They’re about energy. You can experience the essence of your desire by opening yourself to energy. Realizing this correlation, recognizing the fact that they are symbols, is the first step in beginning to see the expression of that energy in your life. Means Goals vs. End Goals
One of the most important things you can do to begin to break down the symbolism in your desires and look at the energy behind them, is to start to ask yourself which of your desires are actually real desires. Which of your desires are things that you absolutely want to experience for the act of experiencing them, and which of them are things that you want only because you think that they’re things you have to do? Maybe that “have to do” comes from an expectation that society at large has set for you, or maybe it comes from a goal that you’ve set for yourself, but the “have to” comes from a limited logical path that your mind sees towards it. One trick that you can use as you begin to explore this is to realize that desires you hold as means goals only for the purpose of achieving other aims, tend to have negative associations with them. They tend to come from an energy of needing to avoid, overcome, or alleviate a situation in your life. True desires, on the other hand, tend to have a positive impulse. They tend to be the feeling of moving towards exhilaration, passion, or love, and they tend to encourage these emotions within you when you think about them. Just by looking at the energy that you experience — the emotion that you feel — when you think about your desire, can help you to sort out the real motivation behind it. Example: Buying a Car To help distinguish between these two types of desires, let’s consider the example of buying a car. I think this is an example most people can relate to in one way or another — you’ve probably had this desire at some point in your life — but the question is where the desire came from. Did you want the car because your old one was breaking down and you needed a new one to get to work and go about your daily errands, or did you want the car because you wanted the exhilaration of it? Generally, if you bought a normal sedan or SUV or another average, day-to-day car, you probably didn’t want the car for the sake of owning the car, but you wanted it to be able to continue on with your normal life. By contrast, if you wanted a Ferrari, or a Porsche, or a new Tesla — something that’s associated more with the rush of driving or the experience of luxury in your car — that might be an end goal in and of itself. The difference is between something that you needed to function versus something that was fun and enjoyable, an experience that you really wanted to have. Exercise: Revealing The Energy of Your Desires/h2>
In this exercise, we’re going to practice revealing the true energy of the desire that you hold. The first thing to do is to think of a desire. It can be anything, whether it’s a small thing you want to do today or a larger aim you’ve set for your life. I want you to take a moment to clearly state and write down that aim in one or two sentences. Then, ask yourself why you want this aim. Why do you hold this desire? Write this answer down in one or two sentences as well. Often, this “why” will be another goal in your life. If that’s the case, keep repeating the process until you wind up at a trait, a characteristic, or a feeling. The goal is to look for a state of being that is behind the desire. Keep going through this process until you get to a feeling. This feeling might be slightly hidden. For example, the feeling might be something you want to be, which is a state of being. “I want to be successful.” Then, you can restate this: “I want to feel successful.” “I want to have the feeling of respect, confidence, integrity, security…” or anything else that is associated with that state. Example: Getting a Promotion For example you might have a desire to get a promotion or a raise at work. If you’re like most people, you probable desire the promotion because you want to earn more money. Then you can ask: why do you want to earn more money? Maybe you want to save for retirement, buy a house, or go on a vacation. Let’s say you want to buy a house: you want the promotion to earn more money and you want more money so you can buy a house. Then you would ask: why do you want to buy a house? Maybe you want the feeling of security, the feeling of stability, or the feeling of knowing that everything in your life is “on track.” Whatever the reason, there is some association you hold with that goal. Dig into what that feeling is and you’ll be able to uncover the symbolism of the original desire of wanting the promotion at work. Exercise: How Many of Your Goals Are True Desires?
If you really take a hard look at this, you might be surprised to find that almost all of your desires are desires you hold for the sole purpose of doing something else. How can we uncover these? Firstly, you can start with the exercise we did in the last video, digging into why you want each desire until you come up with the feeling behind each. The other way is to apply the technique we discussed earlier of noticing whether the energy, the intention, behind the desire, is positive or negative. Anything that comes from even a slight feeling of needing to avoid or escape or overcome, is generally a desire that is a means to another goal. The more you can uncover this, the more you can begin to reflect on what your true desires are. So, take a moment to write a list of at least 10 desires you hold in your life, and dig into how many of these really are your true desires — specific experiences you want to have — versus how many are things you think that you need. Thought Exercise: If Everything Always Worked Out…
I want you to take the time to think about what your life would be like if you KNEW, absolutely knew with 100% certainty, that everything that you would ever need or want would happen for you. How would that change how you move throughout your day? Would you still work? Or, confident that everything you wanted magically appeared, would you just move effortlessly from one incredible, exciting, idea or passion to the next? What is it that you would do? Take the time to really focus on these passions and feel into them. These are your true desires. These are the essence of the energy that you want to feel whenever you take away all of your ideas about what you think you’d need to do in order to get them. Feeling into this technique gives you a glimpse of how desire is supposed to feel, and how you are supposed to live your life. Begin to play with this idea.
The post Lesson 12 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-12 Lesson 1: The Form of Abundance
Whatever those changes are, take a moment to recognize and appreciate them. They might not feel like much right now, but they’re actually monumental steps that are going to propel you into higher and higher states of this joy-bliss-love-light feeling that we’ve been talking about. I also want to take this time to encourage you to take the time to start developing an adequate support network. Having people you can rely on that are both people who are going through a similar process and people who are already close with you in your life is really important as you start to move through these concepts of energy and begin to view the world through this new lens. There are two main ways you can get support. The first is to engage with the Facebook community. That’s the main reason we have this community, so you can get support, interact with and start talking with people who are going through exactly the same steps you are now. If you haven’t already, take some time to share your story with the group. Share your progress so far. Share your thoughts on the lessons as you’re going through them. I think you’ll find that the group is really open and really supportive. It’s a natural tendency to be a bit shy in a forum like that, but I really hope you think of it as a safe space and I think you’ll find an incredible group of people there who really are going through exactly these same steps, exactly the same reservations and hesitations you are. The other area to turn to are people who you’re already close with. This can be a difficult step for many people, because it feels like you’re going through an incredible personal transformation and you might not be aware of how you feel exactly about that shift yet, so it can be difficult and very honest to open up about these concepts and these ideas that you’re starting to have about this energy. I know for me, personally, when I first started to dive more deeply into spirituality and to have more profound meditations and work more consistently with this energy, there was a short period of time when I actually kind of thought I was going crazy and I didn’t want to talk to any of my friends about it because I thought they were going to laugh at me and ridicule me. But bit by bit I started to think about friends that were spiritual or ones who I thought would be open to talking about this change, and one by one I started to open to people. As I did, I found that people — even people who I didn’t think of as being “spiritual” — were often going through a similar process, but often in their own way that was different from mine. When I started to talk with them about it, I began to see the commonalities of that process and could commiserate with both the ups and the downs. The point is, I think you’ll be surprised at how accepting people are and how eager people are to start talking about these concepts, once you bring it up. Like you, they’re probably a little hesitant, a little shy, because it can feel very personal. It feels like a momentous shift in your life, and in many ways it is. Between those two areas: both working with people you’re already close with and telling them about your progress through the course, and talking with people already in the course via the Facebook group, I think you’ll find plenty of support, but you have to take the time to develop it. Defining True Abundance
I want to take a step back from that mindset and offer a different view. I’d like you to start thinking of abundance not in terms of physical things in your life or circumstances that you go through, but rather as the ability to experience anything that you want, anytime that you want it. Read that again: Abundance is the ability to experience anything that you want, when you want to experience it. Think about that definition. It’s likely a radically different approach from the one you probably already hold. It has absolutely nothing to do with how much money you have, how healthy your body is, or how many friends or loved ones you’re close with in your life. Instead, it has to do with the experience of energy — experiencing the essence of your desire. The idea of living a life of prosperity and living prosperously has nothing to do with attaining things in the physical world. Instead, it has to do with experiencing abundance as you move throughout your day to day life. Unconsciously Blocking Your Natural Abundance
This is really common, and is something that all of us do on one level or another. For example, you might think: “If I want something, I need to go earn $X to go buy it.” That’s a very specific route to achieving a very specific physical thing in your world. This is what we think of when we think of our desires (in most cases). The problem with this approach is that as soon as you start to identify the idea of abundance with achieving a specific form, you begin to cut yourself off from receiving that very abundance in your life. Let’s think about that: as you start to associate the idea that “I want ___.” “I want to achieve ___.” “I want to experience this specific circumstance.” Your mind immediately begins to look for that thing, that circumstance, that event, in your physical environment. When it doesn’t immediately see that thing before you, it starts to believe that it doesn’t exist. It begins to focus on the absence rather than the presence of your desire. Your mind, in trying to find the desire for you, instead finds the idea of lack, thereby cementing a belief that your desire does not yet exist. This belief begins to shift your energy away from the joyful experience of desire and into the category of “needing” to go out and work hard/do something/achieve in order to experience the desire. The idea of identifying something that you want with a specific form, creates the idea of lack and begins to block you off from the very thing you want. On the other hand, when we don’t restrict desire to a single, specific form the mind expects, we open ourselves more to the reception of it. That’s because we begin to focus more on the energy — the true essence of the desire — and therefore allow ourselves to begin to perceive that the energy is already present in our lives. It is coursing through us and around us in every particle that we see. We’ll talk about this more in tomorrow’s video, but for now just let this idea start to sink in. Exercise: Your Own Experience
This technique is especially powerful if you can think of experiences when you wanted something and you got it in a way that had nothing to do with money. It might be as simple as a time when you had a small craving for something and someone randomly (coincidentally) gave you that item, or it might be something to do with a longer-term aim in your life. Think about how retrospectively you saw that your desire came to you, but it didn’t come in the way that — at the time — you would have expected it to.
Meditation and Thought Exercise: Living in The Now The post Lesson 11 appeared first on The Joy Within. from http://thejoywithin.org/courses/the-world-you-attract/lesson-11 |
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