Be careful what you wish for, especially in how you frame your desire with words.  Sometimes I think the Universe is sitting back, howling, slapping its all-powerful knee, and saying, “Hey, the Law of Attraction always works!  You received exactly what you asked for!”

One of the things I’d put on my list of intentions for my Burning Bowl ritual at Winter Solstice 2010 was a new dress size, one I hadn’t seen since my pre-motherhood weight of 113 pounds– a size 10. Yep, I was wearing sizes 8s and 10s when I was still light enough to walk on football players’ backs in college.  Within 30 days of setting that intention, I’d lost 20 pounds, with more to follow over the course of the year  (upcoming book on that, of course!). 

At my 2011 Burning Bowl gathering, I was comfortably in size 10’s, some even too loose to keep on my shoulders.  I’d started wearing 8’s and even a couple of size 6’s.  I decided to fine-tune my “look good naked” intention a little and said, “Okay, I want more 8’s in my closet this year.”

Well….

The brand new pair of size 8.5 heels I bought in mid-December looked like they’d be just perfect for a New Year’s dress…until I walked right out of them.  Huh?  Same thing with another pair of 8.5’s.  My squeezy-tight size 8’s, though, were a perfect fit.  Perfect.

How odd, I thought.  I’ve been wearing 8’s since I was 12 years old, and 8’s and 8.5’s since my first baby.  I have great arches and I don’t have fat feet!  Plus, I’d lost and kept off over 25 pounds for almost a year.  Why the sudden change?  (Yeah, yeah, Law of Attraction.  I know.)

After a bit of research on whether feet shrink with weight loss, I discovered that yes, they can, though usually not by more than a size. The bone structure doesn’t change but you can have fat deposits on your feet as well as on your hands and fingers.  Hmmmm.  I never would have thought, but there’s a correlation there between a specific food group I gave up entirely over the autumn and inflammation in the body.  I have had to buy new shoes for both work and athletics in the past week.  So yes, my shoe size shrank from 8.5 to a nice 8. 

To a nice 8.  Yes.  Of course.  My closet suddenly has a lot more size 8’s.

Oh, damn you, Law of Attraction.  Damn you.  I didn’t know I needed to specify Size 8 DRESSES.

How My Burning Bowl Ritual Began

Years ago, I made New Year’s resolutions.  Usually the same ones, every year:  lose weight, stop biting my nails, whatever.   And after the first month (weeks, days, hours….) of trying really hard, I’d find I’d already failed at my resolution.  Yet every year, I made them, even though I was pretty sure when I wrote them down that they’d never happen.  Some of my friends and I even joked that all New Year’s resolutions failed.  But New Year’s Day was a good time to overturn past bad habits and start fresh.  I like fresh starts–I think most people do–and New Year’s Day is generally the biggest fresh start on the calendar.  So I wanted fresh starts.  I wanted to change things up.  I wanted life to be BETTER.

But year after year, I made my resolutions on New Year’s Eve and started fresh the next day and…failed within the month.  The longest any resolution ever lasted was until Valentine’s Day.   I really never had faith in my resolutions or in myself.

Resolutions Are Still Resolutions

Around 2004, fresh out of a 2-decade relationship–one hell of a fresh start–I turned down invitations to parties where too many people wanted to give me relationship advice, and chose to spend the evening alone, quietly, and contemplate the new year in the presence of a backyard fire pit.  It was a quiet night for me, just sitting by a fire and writing down all the things I wanted to say goodbye to and throwing little pieces of paper into the fire.  Then I wrote down the things I wanted in my life, and I threw more pieces of paper into the fire.  These were my resolutions, but in two piles:  what I didn’t want and what I did.  Not a lot of difference in previous years, but more contemplation and more of a personal ritual.  Several of the things on my list actually happened, though some were far into the next year.

Honoring the Past, Inviting the Future

The next year evolved somewhat.  A writer-friend of mine referenced a fire pit ritual as a “burning bowl,” and I loved that.  I also decided to “honor” the things I was saying goodbye to and “invite” in the things I wanted.  No more resolutions.  That word alone had so much consternation in it, such blunt force rather than smooth-flowing allowing.  That year, in anticipation of 2006, I honored my past and invited my future. 

The idea of “honoring” bad stuff in the past was hard to swallow, even though one of my spiritual teachers spoke often of it.  To me, to honor things that had hurt me meant somehow saying those things were good or even “okay.”  Yet, through this process, I came to understand that even the bad things had shaped me into who I was or had made me understand better what I really wanted out of life, and so I could honor the results of that experience.

Taking Action

I made another change that year in my New Year’s resolutions.  I decided to add an action word for the coming ear and a theme for the coming year.  For 2006, it was Manifest and Risk Everything.  I chose those words because of the things that had happened in the previous year.  Funny thing–that was the year I truly came to understand intention and manifestion, and began to let go and just let wonderful things come into my life.   By the end of the year, some of the really important things on my list had happened.  Some were hard, like ending long-term friendships with people I had allowed to make too many decisions in my life.  They were relationships that had fulfilled their purpose long ago but I’d held onto them until they I sometimes didn’t want to be around those friends because so often with them, I felt bad about myself and my life.  It hurt tremendously when those friendships ended but I was living their lives, not mine.

When that year ended and I looked back at my action word and theme, I realized that, while I had certainly not been there when I’d stated them to the stars alone on that New Year’s Eve, I was definitely THERE a year later. 

Welcoming Change

The biggest difference in the next year’s ritual was that I changed from “inviting” in wonderful changes I wanted to “welcoming” in those changes.  Can you feel the difference in choice of words?  You can invite and it not come, but if you welcome it, it’s there! I also stop referring to them as resolutions and changed the mindset to “intentions.”  I was firmly a student of the Law of Attraction at this point and had a much better understanding of it. 

Changing Times

In 2008, I made the biggest change and the most successful in terms of seeing my intentions manifest in flesh and blood.  That was the year that almost everything I stated I wanted/welcomed/expected did indeed come to me.  My new spiritual circle had been going strong for 9 months and I decided to invite everyone over for a Winter Solstice ritual, on the first day of the Winter Solstice.  This way, we could support each other in our intentions and boost off of that group energy when setting our intentions for the next year and honoring some of the harder stuff of the previous year.  Because I’m a big fan of astrology and celestial cycles, I also decided to do it in the first degree of Capricorn (Winter Solstice), symbolic of setting goals that will become solid.  Of course,  a New Year’s Burning Bowl ritual doesn’t have to be done then, but it works best for me and so that why I do it then.

As I wrote in a previous article:

The timing of the Burning Bowl ritual is important to me.  I prefer to do it on the day of the Winter Solstice because of the symbolism.  Not only is this the longest night of the year, but it’s the day many cultures and religions celebrate the “Return of the Light,” as the days begin to lengthen after this night.  It’s also the first degree of Capricorn, an astrological symbol of manifestation–and the beginning of the new year of manifestation–whether you call those intentions or resolutions. 

The Actual Ritual

Since Winter Solstice 2008, I’ve been doing the same ritual with friends, developing our resolutions/intentions, creating action words and themes for the coming year, and celebrating and supporting each other.  I serve a “feast” of roasted chicken and beef, and lots of vegetables and fruits, prepared as simply as possible so that they are are close to nature as possible.   We begin the feast with a “never hunger/never thirst” blessing and a passing and breaking of bread (those of us who are gluten-free partake symbolically and then give the bread to the birds the next day).

Here’s a reiteration of a previous article on the process and what makes my resolution parties so special:

For this year’s Burning Bowl ritual, once our feast was complete, I handed out sheets of paper to each guest and asked them to draw a big T on the paper. This was their personal list to take home, so they can put away their list and review it later in the year.   On the left column, they were to write down the things they want to honor and bid farewell to in the coming year.  Saying goodbye to these things will make room for better things to come.  I gave examples from my own list for the year:

Fretting over the lack of ——– in my life

Any insecurity or jealousy over ——–

Worry about ——-

Most of my dinner guests chose things like bad health habits, obsessions over certain people, money worries, unfulfilling jobs, and long-carried emotional pain. 

Once they were done with the things they wanted to say goodbye to, I had them turn their attention to the right column and write down things that they welcomed in for the next year.  Not things they resolved to do.  Not things they “invited” in, but may not come.  Rather, things they “welcomed” in because that implies that these things are definitely coming to them and they’ll be happy to have these things in their lives.  In my experience, the majority of things in this list arrive effortlessly throughout the course of the coming year.  I gave a few examples from my own very long list for 2009, beginning on Winter Solstice 2008:

Continue and expand my social circle and spiritual circle of friends and students, with wonderful lessons coming to me and from me

More loving relationships with family, friends, and daughters

An amazing, fun, intimate, creative, and intense sex life –and for my partner to be able to keep up with me

Learning new  things and meeting new people, including things like knife-throwing, archery, and motorcycles

Business opportunities that bring me many different streams of abundantly flowing income and allow me to be mobile in my workspace and hours

My dinner guests welcomed in a huge variety of things that were very personal to each.  I thought that was funny that we tended to want to get rid of the same things that weighed us down but what we wish to come into our lives was quite diverse.  I loved some of the younger guests’ desires for good mentors, career guidance, confidence, and many of the things that my older guests didn’t consider until they heard these later.  I was amazed at the maturity of some of the youngest guests when it came to participating in this exercise.

When everyone finally had their list completed, I asked them to consider a verb for the next year and a simple phrase or mantra.  These are, in effect, my themes for the next year, and usually go hand in hand. I have to pick the exact words, and that sometimes means digging out the thesaurus to make sure each word has exactly the connotation I’m looking for.   My themes for the past few years and for the coming year? 

2006:  Manifest  and Risk Everything

2007:  Enjoy and Allow Miracles

2008:  Thrive and  Celebrate Everything

2009:  Enchant and Be Delighted

My guests began to think of their themes for the next year, some brainstorming with others to come up with the perfect word. Once they had their themes, they committed them to memory for later in the evening.  They chose words like Relax, Recalibrate, Have Fun, Be Adventurous, Succeed, Liberate Myself, Accept, Live Life to the Fullest.

For the next part of the evening, I brought out wine glass goblets that I’d bought for 50 cents each from a local pottery store.  I could have gone with plastic champagne glasses but I wanted something that my guests could take away with them.  I’d also tried to find those little rings–wine glass jewelry–that dangle from the stem, but couldn’t find them anywhere in town.  While walking through a discount store after a sushi lunch with my eldest child, I happened on an earring display and found not what I was looking for but something better.  I picked out about 10 pairs of deeply discounted gemstone and shell hoop earrings that closed the hoop with a clasp.  Each fit perfectly around the stem of a wine glass and made a nice souvenir to be imbued with the energies of the evening and taken away as a souvenir, to be worn later, attached to a car mirror or lamp pull, etc. 

Next, I handed out little inventory tags to my guests.  These were purchased at the local Office Max in the section where they sell tags and stickers for garage sales.  Each tag was about 2 inches long, with a string attached.  My guests wrote a symbol, picture, or word on the tags to represent what they wanted to say goodbye to and placed the tags in the goblet’s bowl.  These were placed inside the glass because their cups are already full of these things.

My guests then wrote symbols, pictures, and words on the tags to represent things they wanted to welcome for the coming year.  They tied these tags to the stem of the glass and let them dangle.

For the actual ritual, I’d hoped to gather in my backyard, but the below-freezing weather made it impractical, so we moved my grandmother’s aged cauldron into my open garage and started a very small fire in the cauldron, which served as our burning bowl instead of the usual barbecue fire pit in the backyard.

We formed a circle around the burning bowl, each of us holding a candle.  I lit mine and then then person’s next to me, she lit her neighbor’s on the left, and so forth until the circle was complete.  Because our guests were of varying spiritual backgrounds,  we asked the Archangels–something common to most belief systems present–to witness our intentions. 

After some brief explanations about the symbolism of the ritual, each guest tossed tags from inside their glasses into the fire, saying goodbye to the things that no longer serve them and that they wish to get rid of in the coming year.  Some called out these things proudly.  Most performed this part of the ritual silently, as was their perogative. 

Then, one by one, and in no particular order, the guests allowed me to cut the tags from the stems, leaving evidence of their desires in place around the stem, and offered the tags representing things to be welcomed in into the fire, with our intentions carried away by the smoke to come to fruition over the next year.  Some of the guests were exhuberant at this point and it was so much fun to see them enjoying this and feeling so much lighter and more hopeful.

When all the tags were gone, I then offered each guest a choice of grape juice or champagne and filled their glasses.  We each called out our themes for the new year and toasted to them, clinking our glasses.  Then we closed our evening with thanks to the Archangels for bearing witness.

The biggest difference, I think, in this Burning Bowl ritual filled with intentions toward what we welcome in and the usual resolving to do  a host of things that will get rid of bad habits to that so many of our intentions are not things we actually have to go do (and fail at) ourselves.  These are more like a wish list to God, the Universe, Goddess, or whatever belief system you follow so that we allow Deity to bring these to us and we simply welcome them when they get here.  Since I’ve been doing these Burning Bowl rituals, about 90% of my desires are fulfilled within the first 8 months of the year–and some are ones I just never thought would have happened, and certainly not on my own. 

What Was Different this Year

Not everything went perfectly for this year’s Burning Bowl, but we didnt’ sweat the small stuff.  The stormy weather and other obligations meant some guests couldn’t make it. We had to move the ritual into the garage again because of the rain, and even my Christmas lights on the front of the house had shorted out before we began.  And yet, it was a very serene ritual with an almost giddy energy (for me) at the end.  We’d started in a wide circle, murmuring as we cast old problems into the fire and by the end, the circle had moved in very close.  There were funny moments when someone cast “stress, anxiety, and drama” into the fire and suddenly another 5 or 6 people rushed forward with “me, too!” and cast off their problems, too. 

This year, 2012, for most of my circle will be another year of big turning points.  Some have had horrendous years and are ready for that fresh start.

Signs of Personal Growth

Long after everyone had gone home (it was a weeknight), my elder daughter and I sat up and talked.  I’m glad she did because I’d been thinking I was the only one who’d had a problem earlier in the day with what to honor from the past and what to invite in.  I’d taken a long walk to ground myself and contemplate, and yet, I’d come home almost empty-handed.  You see, for all the stress and rollercoasters she and I have had in our separate lives this last year, it’s also been a phenomenal year for us both filled with lots of productivity, creativity, love, and happiness. 

My 2011 word was Bask and my theme was Enjoy Bliss!  For 2012, it’s Frolic and Stay Radiant!

Like my daughter, I’d had an awfully hard time coming up with awful things to say goodbye to.  I didn’t have an awful year of user boyfriends or drama queen stalkers (just some echoes from the past).  My list was half-hearted at best.  Sure, I could say goodbye to those last extra pounds, but I’m not unhappy with where I am now, and being down about 30 pounds since the last ritual means fine-tuning at this point.  I’m already in  the dress size I welcomed in last year, and less.  I said goodbye to bills, but that was in reference to my daughters being out of my house and on their own.  I said goodbye to rollercoasters because some of my friendships and relationships have had a lot of ups and downs, and I want that to smooth out nicely to just some exhilarating curves and none of the bottom-dropping-out-from-under spins through mid-air.  I said goodbye to something at work that I already know is going away in the big reorganization that’s coming, but it needed to be honored.  I said goodbye to a health concern that I feel will go away just as the others from last year have…the last of the bunch.  I had to stretch to find my goodbye list. Why?  Because to me, they seem like they’re already gone.

For the things I am welcoming in, those were just as difficult to name.  There is no one great big thing I want to welcome into my life in the next year that I don’t already have.  I got everything I wanted from last year, so this year, I simply asked for more of each or the next step up and forward with each. 

That’s when it hit me that yes, I had an amazing year.  I want for nothing.  I have all the things that stir my emotions and make me happy and I don’t have any of the things in my life that push me down.  The only thing I can ask for… is more of the joy.

When I began writing novels for Silhouette Books in the 90’s, I had posterboards with plot points and pictures.  I had composition books of the kinds of houses or cars I wanted and how I wanted to decorate my homes.

Just entertainment?  No.  And looking back, I can now see that most of my vision boards did come true.  Yes, even the hot men with earrings and turned-up collars who gave fantastic foot rubs and knew the latest in music.

For most of my life, I’ve done the kind of work that is hard to see, at least until it’s done. My dual careers have been in mental and creative fields, where the product was most often intellectual property. Sometimes it’s hard to stay on track and keep producing when you can’t see the end result for many months and there’s no evidence yet of the work that’s been done.

If I were to knit a scarf, you would be able to see the yarn and pattern before you saw the finished product.  If I were to photograph a party, you could see the digital photos in the view screen even before I transferred them to my hard drive or posted them on Facebook or printed them.  If I were pruning the shrubs outside your office, you’d see prunings on the ground.  If I were digging a ditch, you’d see a hole and dirt.  But for writers and managers, it’s harder to keep in mind what the end result should look like, so I use vision boards as guides…reminders of what is to come.

I’ve found that, when managing people, it’s helpful to sketch each person under my supervision and picture how I want to develop their talents.  Are they holding awards in their hands?  Are they smiling at their new promotions?  Are they wearing a sash that proclaims them to be the lead xyz on a particular program?   Those vision boards, I keep entirely to myself, though I occasionally share those ideas with those involved.

For my writing, vision boards are even more fun.  They’re almost always mock-ups of book covers.  I have a blast creating them, and sometimes, they give me ideas for the book.  And sometimes they won’t stop giving me ideas and turn into a whole series of books! But they do help me immensely to stay on track, and any time I wonder if I might put away the manuscript for a while, all I have to do is look at the book cover/vision board for inspiration.

Photo by DenaL (http://www.flickr.com/people/denal/); creative commons license.

You’d think after years of writing about “eyes flashing” in my early literary career as a romance novelist, I would have understood.  I didn’t. 

Last week, over lunch with a long-time friend, I saw something that astonished me.  I saw a pair of eyes change from dark brown to bright and colorful in moments.  It was so beautiful that it hurt to look away.  Of course, I had to investigate this breath-taking occurence and after a little research, I realized that it was a perfect example of how emotions precede manifestation.

At this point in my spiritual journey, I’ve honed my understanding of the Law of Attraction fairly well.  Whether I apply it as a template to Christianity, Wicca, positive thinking, the Teachings of Abraham, prayer, ritual, magick, or a hundred other things I’ve yet to skim the surface of,  I have an expert understanding of how it works.  That doesn’t mean I always get what I want–because even though I understand very well how it all works, I often let my own emotional patterns and restrictive thoughts get in the way.  Not as much today as yesterday and not as much tomorrow as today.  I am, as I said, honing my understanding…and that is a process rather than a destination. 

I do love it when I discover some new way to illustrate spiritual teachings.  I find this often in the writings and workshops of Abraham-Hicks (Jerry and Esther Hicks, accompanied by the collective known as Abraham).  Whether you believe in channelling or not doesn’t matter–I do, by the way–but it is the message and the teachings that can be incorporated into your path with great results.  I feel rather smug that I’ve discovered an example I haven’t see illustrated elsewhere for how we use our emotions to manifest and how it is not about the manifested outcome but about the wonderful feeling that immediately precedes the manifestation.

I’ll disguise the situation somewhat so I don’t embarrass my friend, but we were sitting in the shade on a lightly breezy Autumn afternoon after lunch and we were quite relaxed as we talked. She has had an extremely difficult year, filled with despair, but our friendship has endured.  I had good news to share that day, good for her and quite a delight for me.  I have been told that when I’m truly happy, my blue eyes sparkle. I have not seen her happy in a long time, perhaps not in several years.  Perhaps never, really.  I was face to face with her as I told her this good news, maybe fifteen inches from her face.  Near the end of my good news story, something happened rather quickly.  I must’ve blinked, thinking my own eyes had just twitched, but I saw her brown eyes change in color, fire coming into them, a real-live-honest-to-God twinkle, and oh, so much color! 

I did a double take.  I have known her for years and would have told anyone that her eyes were brown, dark brown.  But now they weren’t.

Within a few seconds, her entire mood had gone from solemn and sad to overjoyed, and she was barely smiling before her eyes changed color while I watched.  I saw her a few days later in a more somber and troubled situation, and her eyes were dark brown again.

In my research, I found that the human eye can change color–as a baby or during some stage of life or illness.  That seems to be a process over weeks or months, not over the course of a few minutes. None of those life phases apply to my friend right now.  I also found that medication can cause eye color change, but that’s not the case with my friend either. 

And then there are the “unexplained” (thus far) eye color changes that have to do with strong emotions.  I found that I have several friends whose hazel eyes change color in times of strong emotion, usually anger and occasionally sadness.  In this friend’s case, her eyes changed in a brief span of joyous hope.

Manifesting is like that.  First you feel the emotions, then the outcome manifests.  It’s not even about the thing that manifests–she would never have known her eyes were full of the most beautiful fire I’ve ever seen–but about the emotion, the feeling.   The emotion is what spurs the physical outcome. I could not tell that she was happy with our news, even by her frequent smile, until the change in her eyes manifested.

I got to see the wonderful results, but she got to feel something wonderful first.  She didn’t set out to change her eye color…she simply allowed herself-finally!–to feel good about life and caught up in a moment of joy.

I’ve been extremely emotional over the past few weeks–for no reason that I could point to. I feel sorry for my friend, “Sweet Tea.”  He’s been there with me through this entire emotional rollercoaster, and I let him have it a time or two as well for…I don’t know…existing.  For giving me so very much and not being able to give me more.  I almost feel  I should apologize to him every hour on the hour because even though there are things I want from him that he can’t give me right now…and maybe never will…he has been and continues to be absolutely wonderful to me.

And that’s part of why I’ve been so emotional.

I’m very pleased that Aislinn is getting ready to leave the nest in the next few weeks and that, in the style of a true Abraham-Hicks devotee, manifested an acceptance at UF in less than a month, even though it had been a very unlikely choice for the last two years.  She’s happy, and I’m happy.  And yet, out of nowhere, I have been seething with resentment for the last couple of weeks.  Not at Aislinn, though.  Not at Sweet Tea–he’s been picnicking with me here and there at work, trying to lift my spirits and keep me grounded at the same time.

Sweet Tea helped me to peg what was bothering me.  Part one of it, anyway.  It’s not so much the upcoming empty nest as it is the reminder of the dreams I had before I had my family, of the future I had planned, and of how things didn’t really follow that path.  Of how much of it was spent alone or lonely.  Part of it is the contrast between the emotional support I feel from Sweet Tea and what I did not feel during the era that is now passing away from me.  I admit that I’ve wondered how that era might have been if I’d passed it with him or someone else, though I cannot say I regret that life was as it unfolded in those 25 years.  I’m a product of those years, and I would be a different person if I’d spent them with anyone else, him included.  Whether better, worse, or just different, I cannot say. 

The basis of my suddenly-bubbling-to-the-surface resentments, however, is grounded in the contrast between the vision I had had of what a partnership was and what it turned out to be.  Watching my youngest leave for college means no denying that that particular vision of the future never happened and now will never happen.  I am done raising a family.  And while that does mean a bright and fun new era where I can do things I could not before and couldn’t not now if I’d had the son I wanted, it is the death of a future that must be grieved.  There will be–and already are–new dreams emerging.  Some include things I left behind in favor of my family and partnership with my spouse. The old dreams are fading now, and new one coming into view.

But that’s not the end of my reason for being so over-the-top emotional recently.  I had a key event happen in my life last week.  It’s happened a few times before, and I knew what I was getting then.  My spouse, my family, my friends–they all knew in the past what this key event meant…and they always let it pass without any seeming inkling of how important it was to me, no matter how often I told them that is was a turning point for me.  Important.  On many, many levels.   To the general public, I may downplay the importance of these particular occasions, but not to the people close to me.  In fact, I’ve been accused of not shutting up about it.   Based on the past, I didn’t expect  much support from family and friends, although I did get a few messages from colleagues who knew this event was coming up for me.  But it was pretty much unnoticed by people who are closest to me, as it has been in the past.  If anything, the people who knew most how important it was to me decided to start drama unrelated to me a few hours before so that my mental game would be focused on their needs rather than on mine.  I don’t think it was a conscious decision to start drama–just normally happens that way, like having the biggest fight of my married life the night before one such event and being up all night sobbing instead of focusing staying clear-headed before a career-making/breaking tribunal at the office.  My friends who’ve done Weight Watchers tell me that it’s scarily common for loved ones to unconsciously sabotage a dieter’s goal once she’s within a couple of pounds of it…and so I’m sure there’s some psychological term for all this.  When the event was over and I’d gotten through it, only one person in my family or circle of friends remembered…Aislinn, about 12 hours later.  She’s very young though, and part of me doesn’t expect her to understand what’s that important to her mom.

But I guess I didn’t expect any more than that.  I didn’t expect any real show of support from anyone else because I’ve never had it when it came to something this important to me.  I’ve always wanted it, though, and this time, I got it.  From Sweet Tea.  I mean, really, really got it.  It was jaw-droppingly astonishing for me to have this kind of support.  I can’t even write about it now without getting teary.  Sweet Tea spent hours of his spare time talking me through it, helping me where he could, lending his professional expertise, emailing me little boosts, soothing my frayed nerves.  And praying for me.  I don’t know what to say to that.  He prayed for me.  I’ve not had anyone work magick or pray for me for something this specifically important to me.  Not to him. Me.  There were the messages, the texts, the constant support, the follow-through, the post-event picnic for 2 hours of play-by-play discussion.  I wasn’t even back to my phone before he was blowing it up, wanting to know how I was. 

I know that Abraham-Hicks talks often of a bounce or a wave and the other side of it, but usually in reference to how if you know what you don’t want, then you know what you do want.  But I’ve never heard them speak of what I was feeling here.   Sweet Tea was giving me exactly what I wanted, and the support I was getting from him and the support that I’d always lacked were in such stark contrast that it made me really angry.  It was like suddenly realizing, “Oh, THIS is what it’s like,” and then resenting that I never had it before.  And that’s the shadow side of finally getting something you’ve waited your whole life for–you feel the abundance of support for something and have to spend a few minutes (or hours) honoring or maybe just plain mourning all the years you felt the lack of it.

Revisiting the past– sunset across the fields.   Photo copyright by Aislinn Bailey.

I get more letters from readers of my book, Attract Him Back: Master the Law of Attraction to Bring Back Friends, Lovers, and Relationships from your Past,  than I have time to answer, but occasionally I get one asking about how things are going with a particular man I mentioned that I had attracted back.    I’ve learned something new that I’d like to share with my Attract Him Back readers.
 
During most of my life, I’ve needed a particular kind of partner.  I’ve attracted those types of men into my life, according to my specific needs and energetic vibrations at that time.  A lot of what I’ve attracted to me and later attracted back has had to do with what was going on in my life and what I needed or felt I needed.  I’ve stayed fairly solid and steady in those needs.  That’s why I’ve had such a surprise recently.
 
I’ve gone through different relationship phases and different relationship needs in my life, depending on my career needs, my children’s needs,  my health needs, etc.  I have often adjusted my needs to the needs of those around me, but now that my children are emptying from the nest I’ve built, my needs are becoming more focused on the things I’ve set aside for them and others.  The dreams I built around them are either fulfilled or will never happen now—like the long-held dream of being able to stay home and write full-time while I waited for my little girls to come home from school, get their afternoon snacks before homework help, dinner, and baths and bed.  But, as a friend points out when I fret about the dream that never happened because my relationship at that time did not support it, it’s time to put together new dreams because my life is on the upswing now.
 
Those new dreams aren’t based on children any more.  They’re based on ever improved health, travel, fun, fulfilling activities, dipping my toes back into some intriguing work in my Defense Department career while fascinated by some ideas in my writing career.  My dreams are suddenly about my needs now, and so—to my surprise—the men I’ve attracted back and had been enjoying in my life don’t fit so much into this new vision of my future.  This isn’t an overnight change but a slow transition as they have begun to move out of my life and I am now willing letting them go. 
 
I recently sat and talked for hours to someone I attracted, then lost, then attracted back and was so thrilled to have back in my life.  My relationship with him has been changing over this last year into one where I no longer crave anything romantic or long-term.  We are still incredibly fond of one another but our relationship is developing more into one of platonic friendship, and I am fine with that.  Probably more fine than he is and perhaps we would be together long-term if he’d come back to me sooner, but I am now too far down the road to a new set of needs for him to keep up, I think.  Or at least, for him to be the best source of fulfillment for these new dreams.  He would bring young children into my life at a point where I want to focus more on myself, finally.    He is no longer able to travel…at a point when the world is opening wide for me.  It is not that he no longer cares for me or that life together would not be wonderful, but I’m approaching a new beginning and I know he won’t be coming with me as anything more than a friend I occasionally confide in.  We are drifting apart, and it is because I’m the one who has changed. 
 
I attracted him back, and now I am letting him drift away to something and someone else because my relationship needs have changed.  That’s not a sad thing.  I’m going through an upgrade, and he isn’t at the same place in life that I am now and probably won’t be for many, many years.  
 

That said, I find it rather interesting that I have attracted a new, promising relationship into my life that matches so many of my current needs and the vision I hold for myself, beginning this year.  He has some of the finer qualities of the man I have let drift away as no longer quite right for who I am—the scientific mind, the deep romanticism,  superior intelligence,  a quick wit, a strong respect for me, a quiet but older sexiness.  Things I am often attracted to, yes.  But this one has far more he can offer the new version of me, the one who can travel, explore new health regimens, and pursue new dreams that were put on hold for the sake of my family obligations.
 
Lest you  think I no longer believe in “attracting back” particular men into my life, this man is someone I knew when we were both quite young, just starting out in our careers and families and dreams that didn’t happen the way we wanted.  We never had a romantic relationship and I never expected the possibility of one to come into my life at mid-life with him.  We  have always had an awareness of one another, even though it was never acted upon.  I never set out to attract him or to attract him back to me…my needs changed, and he has appeared.
 
But he’s one of my all-time favorite people from my past, and there’s a reason he’s made it into my future.

One last look at my yard before the freeze.  Ah, Florida in December and it’s going to be 18 degrees????? Photo credit:  Lorna Tedder

This article is from the upcoming book, 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It

The bad news is that I haven’t gotten my Law of Attraction efforts quite right yet, even after three very effective years of practice.  The good news is that I keep learning, tweaking, perfecting my attempts, and I’m getting better every second.
 
After relaxing into my LOA efforts over the summer of 2010 and allowing something wonderful into life in the autumn,  I had a massive screw-up and almost lost something that had become very important to me.  Whereas some of the fall months had me adapting quickly to some lush but shaky new ground I wasn’t used to, by the end of November, I was looking back at losing my emotional grip within a scant month and not understanding—at first—how I’d gone so quickly into a downward spiral. 
 
I spent about 72 hours in seclusion, pondering the events of the previous three months and trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong.  I’m not one of those people who can simply not think about where I got off course and be back on course.  I had to ponder things, figure out my mistakes, and then I can not repeat them.  I have to purge the old and harmful.
 
Though I often write about painful elements of my past, it’s usually in a way to work through them and purge them rather than to relive them.  I write about it and I’m done.  It may raise its head again and I have to write through it, or a different aspect of it, again but outside of my writing, I don’t talk about it and relive it.  That’s where I made a huge mistake back in November.
 
I was asked about a particularly painful time in my life.  It’s not something I discuss and seldom have written about.  It’s in the past and I don’t dwell on it much anymore.  I’m aware of it from time to time, and the wounds inflicted, but I don’t think about it constantly.  I know absolutely that I can’t think about it constantly because if I do, my focus shifts to all that pain, and I can’t stay serene and happy.
 
In order to help a friend, I explained this painful episode from my past.  I answered deep, probing questions about it.  I spent several days talking to my friend about nothing but  that awful time and how I dealt with it so that he could feel more secure in some of his own decisions. 
 
And then, the next week, there were more questions, more reliving those memories, more going back there in my head and thinking about it.  I began to find myself weary of it and dreading talking about it, but I also wanted to help my friend to get through a particularly hard time, so I relented and dug deep into my past.
 
This continued off and on throughout the month, and I noticed that I was becoming less happy and more emotionally turbulent.  To my surprise, I also found the same situation from my past starting to repeat itself in the present. 
 
Uh-oh!  Not good!
 
How did I go from being cheerful and happy and thriving to suddenly upset and insecure?  What had I done?
 
In my radical reappraisal of what was happening in my life at the beginning of December, I realized that the way I felt–as well as the pattern I was seeing repeated–was the same as I’d endured during the terrible time I’d been asked to recall repeatedly in an effort to help someone else.  You see, the brain doesn’t really recognize the past.  If you can go back to the past, back to memories, and think so deeply about them and the emotions of the time that you FEEL them, then you are reliving them.  You are living in the past. 
 
In my case, I was back to a difficult time full of loss and despair, feeling all those feelings again, drawing the same things to me again to lose and despair over.  I stopped smiling.  I stopped laughing.  I feared ridiculous things that hadn’t happened yet would come to pass, just as they had back then.  My entire attention had been refocused to a time of loss, insecurity, pain…and as I relived the past in words and thoughts, I began to repeat it in the present.  I’d lost my sense of happiness and serenity.
 
After a few days of deep thought, I turned the situation around.  The first step was in ceasing to discuss the past turbulence to help my friend.  Answering an occasional question for the rest of my life, I felt, was okay because that didn’t require a commitment to my past.  However,  deep daily discussion of every detail of that era of my life and living there emotionally?  No.   Ultimately, my friend didn’t really need as many details of my own situation as he thought in order to figure out his own path. 
 
Once I disengaged from the past, I felt an immediate sense of relief.  I regained my perspective.  I returned to my “happy place.”    My friend noticed right away how much happier I was, almost overnight.  I dumped the pain I’d gone back into the past and picked up.  My current situation that was shockingly repeating from the past cleared up.  I became more at ease, more serene.  And…from this new perspective of serenity, I was much better able to help my friend by being an example of happiness rather than a victim of the past.

Florida in December, awaiting the 20-degree dips and enjoying these last days of abundant blooms. Photo copyright by Lorna Tedder.

This article is from the upcoming book, 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It

Something had been percolating unnoticed, even before I burned my hand.  Burning my hand was what brought a emotional matter to my attention so I could release and possibly fix it.

What the emotional matter was isn’t really a concern of anyone’s but mine because there’s probably no way anyone else is dealing with the same issue.  I didn’t even know that I was!  The “energy” of the issue was a slow buildup of frustration, of mixed signals, of being unwittingly reminded of old pain I’d put away, of being doomed to repeat something from my past.  I’ve read enough of the Abraham-Hicks teachings that my mind immediately goes now to this energetic connection whenever I have an illness or injury.

It was an utterly stupid way to burn myself.  I wasn’t any more distracted than I usually am when I have four things going in my head at once (standard for me), but there was a particular situation I was thinking about and had been since an enlightening conversation the day before.  I suppose I should be greatful that I don’t work with explosives or blow torches!   This particular issue was on my mind as I was making a really yummy, healthy dinner for myself–and thinking about how all these good health habits will continue to pay off and where I’ll be in six months and my situation then as it applies to the emotional issue I mentioned earlier.  I had placed a paper towel on top of the dish and it had soaked up some of the leftover, microwaved liquid without my realizing it.  Yes, the dish and food were hot and I was taking extreme precautions not to get burned, but I didn’t even see that the paper towel was wet in one corner when I started to remove it… until it was on my hand and then I was losing my balance, flipping the scalding liquid onto the delicate skin of the back of my hand, upsetting the dish, and watching in excruciatingly slow motion as the dish and food bounced into the air and tumbled down to a shattered and sticky mess onto about 40 square feet of hard tiles.  I suppose it’s amazing that I didn’t end up wearing the hot contents of the dish and burning myself worse.

I backed up…across shattered glass…and just stood there for a while, clasping my hand in pain before I could pick my way barefoot to the burn-alleviating herbs that I have grown in the kitchen  for all my adult life. My thoughts weren’t “OMG, I burned my hand!”  but “What’s going on with me that I burned my hand?” 

I immediately thought of the last time an injury made me stop in my tracks  and realize I needed to change something that was building inside me and coming out in erratic injuries.  That time, after a lot of internal anger I kept tamping down and at least four minor accidents in an hour’s time, I ended up sitting on my garage floor and sobbing because the heavy items that had just fallen on my head hurt so badly–and I needed to release my feelings from earlier in the day and change my energy to something more serene that wouldn’t attract accidents.  At that point, I was genuinely afraid I’d accidentally do permanent damage to myself if I couldn’t just STOP and breathe.

So this time, I stood there in my kitchen, staring at my red hand and registering the pain, the sting, the frustration that I’d been so awfully careful not to get burned and it had been what was hidden that had scalded me, upset my balance, left me shattered.    And those were symptoms of what else that was going on in my life that I wasn’t paying attention to?    The energy is the same, and with most injuries and illnesses, the symptoms correlate to the emotional energy that preceded them. 

I tended my injuries, cleaned up the floor and mopped it,  decided to forgo my 1.5 hours of  P90X Yoga because my hand hurt so badly.  I went to bed but didn’t sleep for  a long time, knowing that in the morning, I would need to do something  about the situation that the injury reflected all too well so I could release my pent-up frustrations.

My back patio at sunset, on a beautiful October day.

The last six weeks have been full of epiphanies, but I’ve kept them mostly to myself or shared them with a very  limited number of people rather than here.  They’ve been mainly for me, just me–at least while I’ve been sorting through them to find the biggest epiphany of all. 

I’ve also been forced–in a good way, I suppose–to look back at my most significant romantic relationships throughout my life.  What I’ve found has definitely made me squirm.

I’m glad now that I’ve kept a journal through several significant relationships because many of the finer details would have gone forgotten, not because they weren’t important but because I’d thought those things were gone forever from my life and it was just easier to package them up and put them on a shelf in a locked room in the basement of my heart than to look at them every day and intentionally live in the past.  Reading those journals now leave me a bit astonished to see what was important to me in those relationships then.  I have for a long, long time tried to catalog what I like about someone–though I very rarely share it with the guy.  It’s just my way of  showing all the ways I connect with a person that are incredibly meaningful to me, but this is where I’ve been off-track in the past.  I have associated those attributes with the person rather than with myself and what really “does it” for me.

And where those relationships have faded has been often in the fading of those attributes.   It doesn’t matter how exquisite a man’s intelligence is  or his rare ability to dish about Life, Death, and the Universe…if his ability to be honest with me vanishes or is overcome by alcohol abuse or some other 180-degree turn in his nobility, then the relationship fades and even when he returns to my life (they ALWAYS do), I’m not interested anymore because he’s no longer the person he was with me when I fell in love and I don’t want to go back to whom I was in the past that he fell for because it’s a lesser version of me now and he hasn’t been around to grow and change with me.  My failing has been in attaching those beautiful attributes to that person, even when the person has changed.  There is no going back because I don’t want to go back, only forward.

The biggest epiphany of all is that to attract love, prosperity, career, and more to me is to stick with the attributes and not worry about who the person is who presents himself as a bearer of those traits.   The Universe provides many opportunities for someone with those attributes to arrive in my life, present himself to me, bond and grow with me–but the trick is, I have to be open to allowing the Universe to fill that order for me in a more perfect way than I dreamed, more perfect certainly than that man from my past returning to me but with all those embitterments over where we failed in the past.  When spiritual teachers talk of attracting the right person to you, there are many possibilities for a right person, but not if you don’t allow a right person to come to you in favor of holding that space for someone in the past.    These teachers tell you to ask for your “someone,” not for a partiular someone, because you allow for something (or someone) better than you could have imagined.  As long as you are thinking of a particular someone and not ready to move on, someone better isn’t going to show…or if they do, you’ll just miss it.

I’ve chosen this past spring to move forward, not look back, and let the Universe surprise me. I’ve told myself that I won’t judge, that I’ll just allow, that I’ll see how things unfold beautifully and how the future takes care of itself.   Sometimes it takes a while for that kind of thing to line up, and then again, you can look back and see how it’s been lining up for a long time and you didn’t realize it, had no idea, and it seems to be out of the blue.  Lightning can strike the same place twice, definitely, and even more,  and when it does, it really lights up the sky.

The

Mom,

 1983

….

The

Child,

2010.

My younger daughter, Aislinn, and I made a quick trip up to Georgia to visit my mom on the farm.  Let me tell you, there is no better time to visit the farm than in October, when the weather cools and you can see the whole bowl of heaven at night while you walk through waist-high fog rising over the grasses.  It was unusual that we had the chance to visit on this particular weekend, a quick trip where we arrived in late afternoon and left in early morning but got to stand in the fields under a crescent new moon conjunct Venus in the sinking Western sky opposite Jupiter in the Eastern sky and capture our intentions for 10-10-10 (October 10th, 2010).  One of Aislinn’s photo-shoots was cancelled at the last minute, affording us the rare opportunity to visit Grandma at my favorite time of year on the farm.

On the drive up, we listened to one of my newer Abraham-Hicks downloads and talked about a scenario described where a querent had been talking about Arnold  Schwarzenegger and family to his companion and then a few minutes later, Arnold and family crossed their path.  Aislinn and I talked about how quickly we manifest things now, once we get in the right mindset, and how much fun it is. 

A scant hour later, I sat  in my mom’s den and we talked about relatives I have not seen in years, one in particular that I last saw when I was perhaps 18–almost 30 years ago–or near the age of my younger daughter now.  I sat telling Aislinn stories of this cousin and things he did as a toddler and as a boy and later as a teenager.  I was completely in my “vortex” in these descriptions, even though some were…maybe a bit chaotic.  For me, I was in the vortex because thoughts of this cousin brought up fun, hilarious, scary, crazy memories.  I expressed that I had not seen him in about three decades and wondered how he looked now.  I didn’t think about it at the time, but I had absolutely no resistance to seeing him again but I expressed my desires in my own head while in that glittery vortex moment.

We have a little ritual when I visit my mom–there’s a yummy little  restaurant we take her to that has real sugar-sweet tea, corn nuggets, and great barbecue.  We went earlier than planned for dinner, and as we finished, I got the sudden idea that we could pop by a dollar store on the way home and pick up some cheap workout clothes. 

In the store, my mom and I checked out the workout clothes section while Aislinn decided to go “wander” and see if she could find a particular odd item.  As she was wandering around the store, out of our sight, a man walked up to her and asked if she was my daughter…because she looked much like me at that age.  She led him back to me, and yes, of course….it was the cousin I hadn’t seen in 30 years.

Coincidence?  No.  I don’t really believe in coincidences any more.  This was just another case of the Universe bringing to me a desire that I had no resistance to, that I’d had at a lovely moment in the vortex.   But wow, did Aislinn and I have a greata discussion on manifestation on our later sunset walk through the fields.

“Abraham,” the story goes, “my lover left and now I’m sad.”

I have no idea how many times I’ve heard this Abraham-Hicks example now.  I subscribe to the glutton version of their downloads–the complete unedited versions of workshops as they’re done.  Next best thing to being there!  But if you listen to a lot of their material, particularly back-to-back workshops, you’ll hear some of the same examples used over and over, especially the really good examples.

One that comes up frequently is the story of a woman who was looking for relief through a consultation or workshop with Abraham and explained that she was sad as the result of her lover’s leaving–to which Abraham replied that no, she was not.

The conversation goes back and forth several times with the woman insisting that she’s sad because of the absent lover and Abraham insisting she’s not.    The lesson is that she’s sad because she wants to feel the way she did with the lover, not because he left (I’m paraphrasing and interpretting in my own way here). 

It’s a lesson that I’ve sort of breezed past since the very first exposure to it.  I’ve had at least one lover leave since the first time I heard it.  Maybe two if you count my kicking one to the curb.   Honestly, I’ve been inclined to agree with the woman.  My lover left, and dang it, I was missing him!

I finally got it over a beautiful weekend’s visit to Jasmine Hill Gardens in Wetumpka, Alabama.  I was there to officiate the wedding of one of my favorite people, my “adopted littled sister.”  I had a few hours before the ceremony to walk barefoot through the gardens and ground myself against the chaotic energy of the day.

While there, I was thinking about love and being in love and those feelings.  I’ve been in love enough times in my life to know exactly how it feels.  I think that when we are very young and feel it, we believe that that’s how it will always be.  We don’t understand “new relationship energy” in our first bloom of youth.  When we’re older, we realize that those early feelings of joyous discovery and frantic tenderness ebb and flow through the long unraveling of a  journey together, and if we find them later in life, we know how rare and precious those feelings are. 

I was recently asked how many times I’d been in love.  I grew up thinking that it would happen only once in a lifetime, not half a dozen or a dozen or some magic number.  The fact that we can and do fall in love more than once in our lives is truly a blessing.  If we can remember those feelings and be open to having them again–not with any one person but simply open to the feeling and letting the Universe provide the person who shares them with us–then we can be blessed again. 

When asked why you’re in love with someone, do you usually give a long list of their admirable qualities?  What it really comes down to is more in line with Abraham’s insights.  The answer isn’t about the attributes of the beloved but about the way you feel when you’re with your beloved. 

The woman in Abraham’s story is sad because she’s not feeling that feeling anymore, not because some guy went poof on her.  When she finds–ahem, when she is open to allowing that feeling to reappear in her life, her new lover will come and she’ll maybe think of her absent lover  with a shrug if she thinks of him at all.    As much as we’d like to think it’s about the person we’re with who brings in that wondrous feeling, it’s about the feeling, and then letting the person who embodies that feeling arrive in our lives to take that sweet spot.

For 9 years and 11 months, I looked forward to this high school reunion.  On the last night to turn in my paperwork, I decided not to go.

It was a surprise, mostly to me. 

There are lots of tales of people who go back to high school reunions to put ghosts to rest.  I’m not one of those.  I put those ghosts to rest at my first high school reunion.  They haven’t bothered me since.

People go back to reunions because they feel they have something to prove.   I’m not one of those either.  I don’t have to prove my successes or show that I’m worthy or make anyone notice me.

A lot of people go back to reunions to find out what happened to people from “back then” and see how life and time have treated them, often compare notes because they need some kind of baseline.   I’m not one of those.  Anyone I’ve wanted to find out about, I’ve done so online–and renewed some very nice friendships.

Some people actually go back to high school reunions because they had such a great time in high school and can’t wait to catch up with old friends and relive their fantastic teen years.  Sadly, I’m not one of those either.

Some people are assuming that something dreadful is wrong because I didn’t attend.  No, nothing’s wrong.  Everything is plenty all right!  I’m happy, serene, prosperous.  If I take a quick self-assessment, I am very close to where I’ve always wanted to be.  Health is very good and ever improving with some hardcore P90x.  A beautiful home with frequent social gatherings and a garden I love.  Frequent travel to regional fun places with a big exotic trip planned.  Feeling productive in my career and passionate about my writing.  Enjoying the company of sexy, loving, adoring men half my age.   Mixing both new and old friendships.  Two amazing daughters who are successful in their own efforts as well as compassionate, intelligent, creative.  Constantly expanding my mind with new courses, workshops,  and audiobooks.  Income appearing from unexpected streams while  maintaining minimum to no debt.  Just…having fun.  No, there is nothing wrong at all.  I can’t think of any area of my life that is dismal or unfulfilling in some way.  Life is good.

So why not show up at a reunion to show that off or celebrate it as I’ve been urged to do?

A couple of days before the decision deadline, I was in the kitchen, preparing a meal for the night’s dinner party, enjoying incense and candles, and listening to an mp4 download of an Abraham-Hicks workshop.  I don’t even remember which one, but it was one of the ones from the late Spring/early Summer of 2010.  If you’ve read my blog for a while, you know that I find the Teachings of Abraham to be very inspirational in my spiritual work, and they’ve helped me ease into a life of serenity.  All I remember is that the subject morphed into a discussion of family reunions and other types of reunions.  I perked up at the sound of this because I had a reunion with writer friends coming up in the next couple of weeks and I just couldn’t wait to see these friends again, even though we keep track of each other online daily.  I also had a high schol reunion coming up less than a month later, but my excitement factor wasn’t anywhere near as high for some reason.

Abraham talked about how family reunions throw us out of our “vortex”– our happy place where we have no trouble bringing wonderful things to us–because no matter how great things are going now, a reunion takes us back to where we once were, to other people’s old expectations of us,  to a place we’re no longer aligned with, and the results can be upsetting.  We go back to how we felt with that group or during that time because that’s where the focus is.

That’s when it hit me that even though I was excited about seeing my writer friends in July, I had no desire to attend my high school reunion in August.  You see, high school wasn’t any fun for me.  It was a time of high misery.  Back then, I didn’t fit in and felt as if I were a visitor from another planet.  My way of thinking was different and unappreciated–including by teachers I admired but shouldn’t have–and I spent most of my teen years in despair, being told to be myself but the “myself” that others wanted me to be.  I was actually a really good kid but misunderstood by just about everyone who knew or knew of me.    You know the BREAKFAST CLUB movie from the 80’s?  I always identified with Ally Sheedy’s character.  It wasn’t until college that I met others (a few) who thought like I did.  Now the Internet connects me with plenty of like-minded people, but back then, I was quite alone.  Maybe that’s why I so appreciate people who are different and “unique” and why I’m so accepting of diversity in my friends.

I also find it amusing that I was so sincere about my Christian religion in high school and an outcast among students who weren’t Christian.  Now they’ve joined the ranks of the churched and become Christians whereas I’ve converted to Wicca….so I’m still an outcast among them.

My high school years were so different from my life now.  I’m still that same person inside, still with the brain wired differently, still the visionary–though 20-somethings don’t seem to have any problem understanding my way of thinking and hence, that’s where I find the most date-able men.  In spite of all the body-switch movies where middle-aged moms swap with their teen daughters, I would not want the same.  I’m so much happier in my life now when it is “half over” than when it was just beginning.  I decided I didn’t want to relive memories of an unhappy time and to align myself now with where I was then.    Reunions are about going back to that place where we last left off…and I have no desire to go back there. 

I may not be 18 anymore, but there’s really no place better in my life to be than I am right now…unless it’s where I’ll be tomorrow.

I love being able to set my intentions and watch things unfold.  I’ve gotten quite good at it, and the only thing I love more is setting intentions with my daughters and seeing them come to fruition.  I guess I’m something of a manifestation junkie when it comes to that.
 
This past weekend was one of those that flowed like magick.  Everything we wanted, we got—and then some.  Some of it was instantaneous…some of it took a bit longer.  Some of the things that manifested were small; others meant an exciting new path.
 
Several months ago, I expressed interest in looking more into re-focusing on something I love—writing suspense novels—about the same time hoping to reunite with some good friends I’d met through various writers’ groups and conferences years ago.  I’d been planning a late-July visit to my older daughter, Shannon, in Orlando where she’s a college senior in Psychology when I noticed a lot of my Facebook writer pals talking about seeing each other in Orlando in late July.  The National Romance Writers of America (RWA)—one of the best organizations for teaching and networking with other writers of any genre even remotely related to romance—had moved its major conference in the aftermath of the flooding in Nashville, TN. 
 
I had been a member of RWA for many years, dropping it a few years ago because I was sick of the politics over whether ebooks were “real” books and whether certain publishers were “real” publishers,  battles that I’d been fighting since 1998 when none of my reading audience really cared as long as I gave them a story.  I had decided not to rejoin RWA, at least not until I know they have something to offer me, and not to attend the conference…though it’s been enough years since I’ve published commercial manuscripts that I’m off my game as far as commercial markets.  But I was open to learning if that door to commercial fiction might be worth pursuing again.  Since the new conference venue and time matched with my trip to see Shannon, I ordered up one of the few rooms available for even one night at the conference hotel and decided to turn it into a mini-Disney vacation for my terrific girls and a fun reunion with old friends.
 
On the way to Orlando, Aislinn and I set our intentions.  With so many weddings booked for her to shoot, she’d decided she needed a new 50mm lens for her camera and hoped to get some author-photo gigs at the conference, even though we were arriving a little too late for that.  She wanted to get enough gigs over the weekend to pay for the lens.  We had such faith that we ordered the lens via my iPhone on the way there, with 2-day shipping, so it would be home when we got back.  She also wanted to have lunch at Firehouse Subs in Tallahassee.
 
For me, I had two conference-goers I definitely wanted to spend a little time with, plus three others I wanted to say hello to.  I wanted to get a feel for the market, a fast way to educate myself on the recent changes in commercial fiction, and make some decisions about whether I wanted to invest my time there or elsewhere.  I wanted to get some ideas for future trips of a spiritual and exotic nature.  I wanted some down-time at Disney with the girls.  I wanted a short visit with my former student of Wicca and his current student.  I wanted long walks around the lake and some one-on-one time with Shannon. 
 
Hey, I don’t ask for much!
 
Later Shannon, when we arrived at the hotel, saw all the authors with name-tags scurrying around and remembered all those RWA conferences I dragged her and her sister to when they were little  (I think she still has a personal written message from Nora Roberts somewhere in her memorabilia).  Her goals were simple:  check out the conference bookstore and buy the new hardcover novel by her favorite author, Lauren Willig, and oh, wouldn’t it be cool if Lauren were actually at the conference and autographed the book?
 
But back to our intention-making on the way to Orlando….
 
Aislinn and I had to stop in Tallahassee to take care of a banking issue for a relative.  That Wachovia Bank branch wins the award for Most Difficult Bank to Get to by Car!  We drove circles around it for almost an hour before we ended up on the correct side road to reach its back parking lot.  The bank personnel were super friendly and overheard me tell Aislinn that we’d lost too much time to drive across Tallahassee to the Firehouse Subs she wanted to introduce me to.
 
“Firehouse Subs?” the banker asked.  “There’s one across the street from here.”
 
And it was!  We’d driven past it several times trying to loop back and cross 6 lanes of heavy traffic.  Aislinn got a kick out of how that intention unfolded, and we got some incredibly good sandwiches.  Best evah!
 
Within the first 5 minutes at the conference, we met up with 3 of the 5 people I wanted to see there, including one of our favorite people from the Florida Pagan Gathering festivities.  I didn’t recognize most of the faces in the crowd, and the ones I did were the ones I wanted to see!
 
We had dinner with Maggie Shayne et al at Don Shula’s Steakhouse—and some of the best food of our lives, with three waiters and a towel boy, and lots of laughs and good conversation while men waited on us. (I could get so used to that!)  Later, I took a sunset walk around the resort with Shannon and we talked about the psychological motivations of the characters in the Hand of God novel I want to write, did a little brainstorming, and soaked up the pastel colors of sunset on the lakes.
 
We returned from our walk to find Aislinn super-excited.  She hadn’t set up any author photo gigs since it was so late and we were so tired but…suddenly she had four new clients emailing her from home, clamoring for appointments.  More than enough to cover the cost of her new photography equipment.  (And several more clients sought her out the next day!)
 
We brunched with Sharyn Cerniglia, one of the most upbeat Law of Attraction/Abraham-Hicks folks I know and such a joy to be around.  Barbara O’Neal, who that night won a major award for one of her novels, joined us and the two told us all about their recent trek along the Camino de Santiago, which is high-high-HIGH on my to-do list now.   
 
I walked back through the conference area while Shannon checked the bookstore to see if anyone knew if Lauren Willig was at the conference and there I discovered that I could purchase the entire set of conference workshops on audio CD for less than $1 per workshop, provided I paid at the conference.  No requirement to be an RWA member or conference attendee.  These workshops included advice on craft, market, what specific publishers were looking for, etc.  Hmmm, pretty much exactly what I was looking for so that I could come up to speed quickly on the state of commercial fiction…for a whopping $450 less than the conference fee. 
 
The girls and I headed out to Epcot, marveling at how we’d gotten everything on our intention list.  Well, almost. We still thought that it would be nice of Lauren Willig were at the conference.  Shannon’s been a huge fan of the Pink Carnation books  for the past year and devours everything Willig writes.  We did the things we loved at Epcot, decided it was ferociously too hot, and headed back to the hotel to pick up my car before going to Shannon’s to hang out and  take the girls and Brian to see “Inception.”  We dropped by the bookstore so Shannon could buy Willig’s hardcover, and then…waited outside a late-afternoon workshop  Lauren Willig was giving!  Shannon got her book signed and got to meet the author, who definitely lived up to her expectations.
 
I was exhausted when the weekend was over, but it was a good kind of exhausted, the kind where we got all the things we wanted and it seemed that all we had to do was ask and it was given to us.

We happened upon this little reminder at Disneyworld.  Photo by Lorna Tedder; all rights reserved.

The three of us Law-of-Attractioners were talking about how people who aren’t good for us, when we choose not to be with them any longer, just seem to not be around so much.  The transition to the “not-so-much” usually takes more than a few minutes, though.  In some cases, it’s months.  In other cases, even years.

I’ve been accused of cutting people out of my life on a whim.  To me, it isn’t a whim.  It only seems that way to people who haven’t been observant enough to notice my efforts.  By that point, I’ve usually exhausted all measures to get along or either discovered that the person I’m cutting out is so unethical that I cannot abide their presence any longer.  When I’ve had enough, I’ve had enough and it’s over. 

Sometimes, they don’t want to go.  There’s nothing worse than deciding you are done with a relationship and want nothing else to do with it and the other party just won’t let go.  They keep texting, emailing, calling.  In short, they have to be in control and will do whatever it takes to be the one in control, sometimes even so they can get  into control just long enough to be the rejecter rather than the rejected. 

Eventually, the more you focus on new stuff, exciting stuff, any other stuff than that relationship, they fade away.  They leave you alone.   They move away.  They find someone else, at least for a little while.  The wavelengths you haven’t been on in a while further separate, and you begin to bring wondrous new things into your life. 

So how is it bad people (or people who are bad for you) re-appear when you least expect it?  The latest female diversion is out of town or they’d had an argument and wham—right back and expecting everything to be the same as it once was.

I really can’t answer the question of how we attract such past-tense experiences and people back into our lives when we’ve changed our lives so much for the better.  For me, it seems always to be a shock but, at the same time, a beautiful reminder of what’s changed.  Of the lack of negativity that surrounded my life then.  Of the thickets of lies I had to machete my way through.  Of how much better life is without their negativity, manipulations, attitudes. 

It’s a measuring stick, I suppose.  I forget sometimes how good life is…or maybe how bad it once was.  The Law of Polarity, which means you need to know the opposite to understand something truly. When old things I thought I’d drummed out of my life reappear,  once I catch my breath, I usually realize that the contrast is a great way to brighten my present and future.

Today, I read with confusion that the rain that fell here on the Gulf Coast yesterday was black with oil and that I’m being prohibited from speaking out about the true conditions here  in the Northwest corner of Florida because I’m secretly under martial law and some sort of lockdown.  Really? 

These words were spoken with authority by some guy who’s never stepped foot in the area I’ve lived in since 1985 and still live, work, and have the freedom to say pretty much whatever I damn well please.  But he read it somewhere, or saw it in a conspiracy-theory website somewhere, and therefore it must be true.  As my readers know, I have nothing positive whatsoever to say about BP or the oil spill (just search oil spill in the search box to the right).  However, some of the spewing of rumors is ridiculous, baseless, and deeply upsetting to people who aren’t getting balanced coverage, no reference to FOX News intended.  Some are, however, quite fascinating as conspiracy theories.

I’m not a big fan of fear-mongering, but I am a big fan of conspiracy theories.  I love to write them, love to read them, love to watch them in movies.  Maybe that’s because I like the kernel of truth, the plausibility, the drama and excitement of it, and yet it’s just outlandish enough that I can recognize the paranoia and know that it’s not wholly the truth.    In other words, I’m not so focused on the barely disguised hope of conspiracy theories  being true that I see conspiracy in every utterance of life.

Something about the human race seems to crave End of the World catastrophe and apocalypse.  In my non-writing career and in my Southern Baptist the-last-days-are-upon-us childhood, I’ve heard thousands of theories, all focused gleefully on doomsday.  Maybe there’s some fantasy of who might survive such a doomsday–certainly the characters in my books don’t perish and somehow manage to stop it or delay it and save the world.  Maybe it’s our ultimate fantasy to get out of this world alive, even if we’re the ones fleeing the planet on a spaceship, saved by an alien race or whatever the current movie of the week delights in.

And yet, it’s disturbing to watch people focus so much on disaster that they  spin themselves into nothing but disaster.  The Law of Attraction would say they bring it to them…and I’ve seen that more than once–which is what scares me more than anything else.

I work with many different individuals and teams, and one group in particular makes me want to run screaming from the room every time I meet with them.  They’re skilled, competent, nice people who had a few distractions early in their project, resulting in what seemed like a short run of bad luck.  Yes, these things happen. Most professionals push ahead and focus on a positive outcome. Not these good folks.  They got into a downward spiral of “how much worse can it get?” to “we’re cursed” to “nothing ever goes right.”  On that last count, it became a reality.

The group wasn’t focused on conspiracy theories but most of my social time with them was spent listening to BP oil spill comments and watching them spin themselves into tizzies over things none of us can control.  From there, it became a huge what-if list that stressed them out.  These attitudes spilled over into their professional demeanor.  They began cataloging daily earthquakes around the world, not quite understanding that the planet moves within and always has but now we have the technology to record tremors we never knew existed before.  Then they added various catastrophes– tsunamis, hurricanes, airplane crashes.  They had a whole wall of one room dedicated to disaster after disaster after disaster. 

Were they a positive bunch to be around?  No.  Did they have the slightest belief that they would finish their project without a hitch?  No.  In fact, I have never seen a project have as many unforeseen glitches and disasters as theirs.  In spite of their competence, they constantly spun themselves into worry and upset.

I do believe that we fulfill our own prophecies.  If we look for flaws, we will find them.  If we look for disaster, we’ll find that, too. 

In regard to all the reporting on the Gulf oil spill, I guess I’d just like to hear and see the truth, without the spin of fantasy, and keep all my conspiracy theories and wild-eyed reports of apocalypse by non-witnesses on the screen or in books where I like them to be.

I think it’s sad when people are so consumed by an issue that they can no longer see anything else objectively or positively.  Everything they encounter is evidence of how they’ve been wronged.  People who don’t know me have taken spoken and written comments I’ve made out of context to prove I’m pro-XYZ or anti-XYZ, all depending on the filters they’ve created for their lives.  A good example of this is found in my article,  “Racism, Sexism, and Religious Prejudice: Seek and Ye Shall Find.”

So I decided I didn’t want to become THAT passionate about a minor health issue that I’ve managed easily.  In fact, I’d rather not focus on it or even think about it at all.  I shut down the project and didn’t worry about the financial or time investment.  It’s a far greater investment in myself and in my serenity to be passionate about much happier things.

 Photos here used with permission from Gregg Hall and True Reporting on Gulf Oil Spill.  Photos show oil on the white beaches in nearby Pensacola, Florida (currently being covered up–WTF?–by yellow sand brought in) and the notice given out by the local National Park Service, even though the health advisory signs have been covered over with black bags.  If you’re curious about what’s really going on here on the Gulf Coast, forget the mainstream media and get the scoop direct from the locals. Click on the photos for a larger view.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Teachings of Abraham and believe that they make a fine template for most religious thought.   I’ve been in the presence of Deity, both as a devout Christian and later as  a devout Wiccan, and it’s the same to me as what Esther Hicks and Abraham refer to as Source or The Vortex—but that’s another post on semantics and universality of the human experience.  I’ve gotten quite good at being in a highly positive mindset all the time.  Where I’ve had trouble recently is with the Gulf Oil Spill and pivoting from my anger and irritation—and feelings of contamination and toxicity.

I’m one of the Abraham-Hicks “gluttons.”  For those who are familiar with their subscription program, you can download unedited versions of their workshops, which are 4 to 10 hours, depending on whether the audio is of a regularly workshop or one of their cruise workshops which are much longer.  These are great for me because I consistently always hunger for new perspectives and use these downloads to augment my spiritual work. 

Since the oil spill on April 20, 2010, I’ve listened to at least 5 or 6 of these lengthy downloads and,  every time, a question either comes up about the oil spill or Abraham addresses it directly.   It’s clearly heavy on the minds of workshop participants.  The Abraham perspective is always useful to me, but it’s only now after 74 days and seeing the snow-white beaches 5 miles from my home become contaminated and toxic that I am finally beginning to shift to a better mindset.  That’s evident in my health over the past 2 months.

In the beginning, when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill first occurred in April, I was annoyed, irritated.  And that grew with every news story.  I don’t normally have allergy problems after the end of March or the first week of April when the pine and oak pollen have subsided, but by Mother’s Day, I seemed to be allergic to everything—and very sensitive to the fumes occasionally blown inward from burning oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  My allergies induced asthma and a severe respiratory distress,  and every time I walked outside into that gods-awful smell, my throat closed up.  That’s honestly very scary, as I happen to like breathing and my throat closing sends me into an automatic, primal panic.   There was a definite physical connection between my allergies and the oil spill.

From a metaphysical viewpoint, there was also a definite connection between the spill and my allergies.  The emotion related to the symptoms?  Irritation.  I’ve always been very irritated by people who don’t take responsibility, by people who make a  mess and don’t clean it up, by people who destroy something through intention or negligence and then expect me to deal with it.  And I really get irritated (agitated is the proper word, I know) when someone makes a mess of things and LIES about it.  BP certainly triggered a lot of anger and annoyance in me but irritation is the best way to describe both my feelings about the oil spill and the symptoms of my illness. 

The worst of it came as I began to see the reports of the beaches I love becoming contaminated and toxic (with chemical dispersants like Corexit) as black oil washed ashore in nearby Pensacola, an hour west of here.  My illness became much more serious as a new infection took hold while I was already weak, and yes, it was life-threatening.  I understood the metaphysical connection but still couldn’t shift it that quickly.  I was still feeling irritation but now, I felt vile and violated, poisoned, out of balance, impure, contaminated, toxic…pretty much my emotional connection with the waters and beaches of the Gulf. 

My new medication is working now, though I may be on it for another month.  I’ve made a significant shift in distancing myself from the toxicity and irritation.  It’s taken 74 days to get relief and get to a point of looking forward again.  I don’t know that it’s acceptance or resignation, but my empathic nature requires me to find some way to shield myself emotionally from the tragedy that’s hit home.

 Photo taken by camera phone at a beautiful lake near my house at sunset, April 2010, before the smell of oil tainted the air.  Photo copyright by Lorna Tedder; all rights reserved.

One of the most valuable things I’ve learned in the past year is that I can cure myself, that I do have that power.  I’ve also learned that it’s not always easy for me to use that power.

I’m not new to the mind-body-spirit connection or to the idea that there is a metaphysical reason for various illnesses.  I first heard insights on this back in the mid-90’s and later while listening to Louise Hay’s audiobook, You Can Heal your Life.  I could easily make the connection with sickness and injury I’d endured over the years:  the lack of support that manifested as a mid-back injury;  the rejection that manifested as nausea; the feeling that I couldn’t move forward that manifested as a foot injury.

While listening to a Abraham-Hicks workshop from the late Spring of 2010, I heard something that resonated with me. It came at just the right time, too, because I’d been dealing with allergy-induced asthma exacerbated by the controlled burning of oil from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  I smell the wind-driven fumes and immediately my throat closes up.  Initially, it had started as an allergy to star jasmine (which all my neighbors tend to favor) and then to mold in a home where I was an overnight guest, and just got worse until I lost my voice for several weeks.

I’d read years ago that allergies were a sign of irritation and how if I could only let go of my irritations, I’d let go of the allergies.  Uh-huh.

But what I heard in the Teachings of Abraham made me think about it in a different way.  The advice given was to think about the symptoms of the illness or injury and find the emotion that matched it.  Then ask if that emotion is one I was already feeling before the illness or injury occurred.  Then, to find healing, shift that feeling to something better.

Something clicked.  It’s not uncommon for me to realize I need to stay home from work for some reason and suddenly become sick long enough to miss the work day and then feel great.  I can go to bed thinking that I really need more rest after a grueling week but I have to go to work.  Then I’ll have insomnia—“I need more rest”—all night and wake up realizing that I absolutely can’t go to work because I must stay home and get more rest.  But that’s a simple analogy.  Let’s go for something more difficult.

I became ill during a breakup.   I was, eventually, able to shift my emotions and heal myself, completely.  My doctors thought it was somewhat miraculous but I’d been working on healing myself and figuring out what to do to heal myself for a long time.  When I did, everything clicked into place and my test results were suddenly…well, miraculous.  I couldn’t quite explain what had happened to change it but my feelings definitely shifted after I made a few key decisions.  Now, when I look back and try to identify   the emotion that went with my symptoms, it was one of feeling like a victim or as if I’d sacrificed too much.  I’d felt that way before the illness took hold.  Once I no longer felt like a victim, the illness disappeared.

Back to my allergies….  They progressed to the point of becoming a trachea infection.  That was a shock.   The last time I’d had a trachea infection, I’d been on bed rest for a month, voiceless for three months, and didn’t fully recover for a total of six months.  That was five years ago.  Then I made another connection:  the person in my life at that time had reappeared and our interactions in 2010 closely resembled our interactions in 2005.  That had to mean something. 

Once I heard the suggestion to make the connection between the symptoms and the emotion, I understood.  The allergens were irritants, yes, but the dominant emotion related to the allergy-induced asthma was annoyance.  Had I felt that way before the asthma began?  Yes, in relation to this particular person and his actions.  I had felt annoyed.   There were a few other related emotions I won’t get into but once I made the connection and began to shift my mindset away from thinking about his annoying actions, that particular allergy problem went away—overnight. 

Sometimes it seems that I must simply acknowledge the symptom’s underlying emotion and shift my attitude and feelings so that the symptoms are quickly gone.  But it’s not always easy.  I am still having (different) allergy/asthma problems, and they’re tied to the BP Oil Spill.  I am greatly annoyed and feel powerless.  And I cannot yet shift my feelings or soften them toward the spill or toward BP’s recklessness.  I continue to smell the petroleum in the air and I’m immediately annoyed and impotent to stop it.   And I’m angry.  My throat closes and I’m driven back indoors to avoid the fumes.

So from a metaphysical viewpoint, I know how to heal myself.  I just can’t do it yet.

 
Esther and Jerry Hicks’ The Teachings of Abraham DVD IV of the Law of Attraction in Action series,  Path of Enthusiam!, is a 2-DVD set, almost 4 hours long, that’s been excerpted from their May 2007 Philadelphia, PA, Workshop.  It retails on the Abraham-Hicks website for $30.  HOWEVER, I’ve “attracted” a better deal for you, and you can get it–new–for 1/3rd to 2/3rds of the list price here. 

So that I’m not telling you exactly what Abraham advised for every question asked on these DVDs, I’ll tell you areas of concerns I’ve had that were answered for me.  Funny, how that happens.  I don’t have to ask a question myself–the answers will come to me through the questions of others.

This DVD set had the usual Abraham nuggets that I’ve come to love—such as great analogies about GPS guidance systems in your car or finding lost things like keys or glasses—plus some oft-asked questions that you hear again and again in some form if you listen to Abraham-Hicks products as much as I do.  Those include heart-felt questions from parents who want to help their children attract the good stuff and protect them from mistakes, winning the lottery,  and issues with the environment.  Though this workshop was taped 3 years before the BP Gulf Oil Spill, Abraham’s advice is consistent with answers to questions about the oil spill at the recent Houston, TX conference and others since the spill occurred.  Abraham makes excellent points about how mankind tends always to look for some kind of huge catastrophe to push against, and offers up ways to find feel-good moments about the environment and even the potential for extinction of certain species.  I was listening to this workshop at the same time that the first tar balls were washing ashore  5 miles from my home, so the words of wisdom came exactly when needed.

Abraham reiterates the goodness of accepting where you are and how to do it.  I find it so true that most friends and family prefer you to be either depressed or joyful because either is less trouble to them than if you are angry or doing something about the situation.  Their discussion echoed my experiences coming out of relationship breakups where my friends either wanted me to be instantly “over it” or just crawl into a cave and shut up.  I was advised that anger wasn’t spiritual and striking back—even to balance the scales of justice–certainly wasn’t.  Abraham talks about what is sometimes necessary to get to a better feeling place, and that it’s not easy on the people around; therefore, if you express any of your louder, dark emotions when you’re hurting, you’ll get pushback to tamp it down and hold it in.  That’s part of making other people’s feelings/expectations more important than our own, and keeps us out of alignment.  A perfect example would be when I told my mom about my marital problems years ago when I was terribly depressed and she urged me to give up my spirituality if it meant I wouldn’t “mess things up” with my spouse. Living up to everyone else’s expectations was killing me, and it wasn’t until I threw off the restrictions I’d accepted that I began to get to a better feeling place in my life and later to a really great feeling place.  Getting to a better feeling emotion is, to me, power and the owning of that power.

Another point of this DVD set that I find personally meaningful is the part about feeling you have to prove something.  Proving something, as I understand it now, is more about doubt and feelings of lack and unworthiness.  If I’m proving to others that I can do something—say, sell a movie—then I’m letting others’ fickle opinions drive my actions and state of mind.  If I’m trying to prove to myself that I can do something—say, lose 20 pounds—then I’m trying to show that I can struggle and overcome and win out over my knowing that I can’t do it…rather than just simply knowing and enjoying the process. Abraham explains quite well how the need to prove something makes it more distant to manifest.
One other very interesting point to me was the discussion of the chakra system and how to keep chakras unblocked.  I was especially surprised at Abraham’s words that chakras are unimportant and why—and even more surprised to find that, based on what was presented, I agree.

These were the most pertinent questions this DVD set answered for me.  The rest was of good quality, too, and Path of Enthusiasm! was certainly worth buying, listening to, and sharing with friends in my home.

For the best price I’ve found on this Abraham-Hicks DVD, buy here.

 A small, dense object only twelve miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years.

At the center of this image made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short…..

Photo copyright and more info at 

 http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/b1509/.

Huh?  What am I working on?

Maybe it’s just a writer thing—because I don’t usually hear it asked of “normal” people within 10 seconds of someone meeting them  or reconnecting with them—but I often run into people who immediately after saying hello launch into questions of what I’m working on.  They don’t mean the multi-million dollar projects I’m working on in my non-writing career or my latest home repair-refurb-redecoration. You writers, artists, and musicians know what I’m talking about.

I don’t get the question from people who are very, very close to me.  They already know what I’m working on.  They hear it all the time because I’m excited about it, Gods help them.  The question is always from acquaintances or friends outside my small inner circle.  They know how much I love writing but don’t keep in touch that often…or just stay out of earshot when I start plotting a novel.

What I’m currently working on, writing-wise, is editing a Lauren Hartford project and several non-fiction ebooks, including 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It.  And I’m almost done with some last-minute tweaking of  Waiting on the Thunder.  I’m done, but I’m having a hard time letting that one go.

But I’ve started a new novel, too.  First time in a long time that I’ve started a new project.  I still have three finished books yet to edit since I started my last new novel, and I wrote all three of those while power-walking daily with a digital recorder, busy girl that I am.

It’s hard to explain what this new fiction project is, but it’s a suspense novel with the working title The Hand of God.  It’s not a religious book, though I’ve definitely thrown in some Law of Attraction.   The title refers to a specific image, and that’s the genesis of this new novel.  You want to know how I get my ideas?  Right here. 

Last week, while visiting with family out of state, I drove past an out-of-the-way spot that had a really strong visual allure to me.  An image there stood out, and to me, it looked like a “Hand of God.”   Later on the trip, I took my family out to dinner, to a place I’d never been—a hole in the road that served everything fried, including gator tail.  On the wall behind us was the same symbol I’d seen earlier, several miles away, painted into a mural.  That’s when the story began to form. 

I’m not sure how to explain it yet without giving away the story, but I know who the villains are…and the victims…and the protagonist.  The protagonist is not in any way based on me, but she’s the imagined adult version of a child I observed earlier this year.   The crime is based on something that never happened to me because, wow, am I ever being watched over!  But I came close enough that it got my attention and this novel will put it to bed for me in a therapeutic way.  The 24-year-old protagonist has abandonment issues—both the constant abandonment throughout her childhood and her adult patterns of abandoning others before they can abandon her—and those abandonment issues from her childhood are tied to someone else’s dark secret and even darker revenge.  Yep, my kind of story. 

The best part is that I’m not writing it according to any guidelines or any preferred market.  I’m just lettin’ ‘er rip.  Having a blast with discovering the twisted past she’s repressed and how it endangers her.  I’m not writing it for any particular audience or publisher.  I’m doing it for me.  It puts me into a joyous place, all this creativity, and when I’m done, people who love it will recognize the spark in it and love it, too.  It’s not the path to money or fame or anything but my enjoyment.  Anything more that it turns into is just gravy.

So what are you working on?  And is it for you?

This article is from the upcoming book, 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It

Early in my writing career, I became a regular victim of  my own sabotage.   It wasn’t the baby editors or the money-grubbing agents or the sucky market.   At the time, I believed the only way for me to gain acceptability as a novelist was to find a major international publisher who would pay me a pittance for a book that would sell 100,000 copies.  Technology has brought many new options to writers since then, and though I’ve not sold as many copies of books I’ve published through what used to be unconventional means, I’ve made more money per book than most of the ones I sold to major publishers, and I’ve done it  by finding new and unique ways to get my work to my audience. 

I’m primarily a suspense writer, and I love a good  thriller with a little romance thrown in and maybe even some paranormal.  Though I’ve written in just about every genre but westerns, my biggest sellers were in the  romance genre, particularly  what’s known as romantic suspense or paranormal romantic suspense.   That means lots of plot and complicated twists and some form of boy-gets-girl.  I didn’t really care which genre I got published in as long as a major publishing house validated my writing.  I shoe-horned myself into romance amid many skilled authors who could go deeply into emotion and character whereas I was more about the story and keeping the surprises coming right up until the last page. 

Unfortunately, instead of using the Law of Attraction to bring me opportunities that were easy and fulfilling, I did a great job of shoving my dreams away from me and making it as hard on myself as I possibly could.

The most obvious example of attracting the wrong thing to myself was in my rejection packages.  I joined the best writing groups out there, including the Romance Writers of America, which had excellent tools for teaching the craft and business of writing for publication.  They taught me what I needed to know about writing, selling, and promoting my novels, to the point where I hit a couple of chain bookstore bestseller lists under my pseudonym.  They taught me what to expect from an editor and how the whole process worked to get an editor to read your manuscript without using it for a foot stool (my second editor did that with another author’s manuscript).  They taught me that  if the editor wants your work–something that you could expect to happen rarely–you would get “the call.”  Acceptances were always a phone call.  Rejections meant a fat package in the mailbox.

Or a package that wouldn’t fit in the mailbox.

Writers had a lot fewer options for publication in the 1990’s when I was getting my start.  We had to accept conditions we didn’t like, such as “no simultaneous submissions.”  That meant we printed out a 400-page manuscript, packaged it up, spent a small fortune to get it to New York City, and then waited for a response…often up to six months, even when we were under a contract that said the editor had to notify us within 60 days of acceptance or rejection.  Remind them at five months, as I did with my second editor, and the rejection could arrive almost immediately for every project on her desk.  My longest submission–where I actually received a response at all–took 24 months to the day on a 30-page proposal.  Good thing I had a personal invitation from that editor to send the book!

I was prolific, and I rarely had fewer than five projects out for review, usually at more than one publishing house.  But instead of every day expecting every phone call to be from an editor in New York, which would have been the best way to use the Law of Attraction as a writer, I came home from day job and began to crane my neck to see the mail box from the moment I spotted my house down the street.  Sometimes I saw them crammed into mailbox,  those returned packages with a polite “Doesn’t work for me” or “Pushes the envelope too much” attached to pristine, unread tomes or to pages that smelled of cigarettes and coffee.

If I turned the corner on my way home and didn’t see an overstuffed mailbox or maybe a box resting atop it, my heart would skip a beat.  Another day, I thought, without a rejection, and that meant the possibility of going to contract on a new book. Then I would steer past the mailbox and into the drive and I’d crane my neck to see if perhaps the mailman or UPS had delivered a rejected manuscript direct to my door, which was also a familiar sight.  If not, then I could wait another day to see if the editor called with good tidings or left me an unwanted package.

Looking back, I see now that I was looking for rejection. I was focused on it.  I didn’t listen for the phone call–no, I looked for the rejection in the mail.  It became part of my daily ritual, Monday through Saturday, to look for rejection on my doorstep.

There were many other abominations that happened, like losing my editor, like getting a new editor who hated suspense, like having an editor give my killer title away to another author after rejecting my manuscript for being too similar to one she’d just bought, like having an editor give my entire synopsis AND the heroine’s unsual name to a has-been author who needed a new historical bestseller,  like finding a terrific editor and having the company close down the line three months after my novel was published due to a change in the market.  I could go on and on, but honestly, I’ve forgotten most of those atrocities now.  I no longer focus on them.  At the time, it was a feeling of helplessness in the big, bad publishing world and anything that could go wrong did.   Like with most authors I knew.  There were things going on in my personal life where I felt I had no emotional support from my loved ones and I put a lot of desperation (aka resistance) into having my dream career as a successful, full-time writer so I could leave a less fulfilling but more prestigious career.   

Things turned around for me when I found a place of contentment with my writing career.  I don’t have to put that old pressure on myself to make a new bestseller list or get a three-book contract or have my editor adore me.  All I have to do is love what I write and ways to get it out there to readers who enjoy my work will appear.   But since I’ve come to understand the Law of Attraction, I never ever go looking for rejection.

When you’re in the middle of a horrible experience, it’s hard to remind yourself that it’s making room for the good stuff coming that wouldn’t have a place to settle into your life otherwise.  As much as I don’t like losing people or situations in my life, I do believe that when we’re no longer attuned or aligned with the people or situations, they will…they MUST…exit our lives.  We can focus on how terrible the loss is or we can open our arms and welcome the gains that are coming to us. 

As much as I dislike the Bible story of Job–how can all his loved ones be replaced?! and why would a loving God do this as part of a wager!–I do understand Job being blessed many times over with the new things that came into his life.  Few of us volunteer to lose the things we are so attached to, though, regardless of the exponential blessings that might be in store for us.

This is an observation best made after the horrible experience and the wonderful new blessings, because generally our emotions are too fragile during the horribleness to even think about the blessings.  Now, so soon after one such experience, I can only smile.

A lot can happen in two months, if you let it. Less than two months ago, I was faced with losing my relationship with my younger daughter.  There are not that many parents of teens I know who have great relationships with their kids–I almost always hear the opposite from colleagues, friends, and even strangers in the grocery store.  I’ve been very grateful to have two amazing daughters who are beautiful, intelligent, compassionate, talented, and just about every other positive adjective I can imagine.  So when I am feeling so blessed with such loving relationships with my kids and someone messes with that?  It eclipses any good feelings I have for the person or persons threatening irrevocable damage to those blessings.    A moment of drama for someone else can give that person a passing thrill, but the damage done is permanent and at a critical point in a young adult’s life.  So of course, I’m going to fight that, and I’m blessed to have had others like my older daughter and my new friend Karen to step in and show her the truth from a more objective point of view. 

Two months ago, my daughter’s mentor put her in a situation where she felt she had to choose between him and me because I chose to end my personal relationship with him.  She initially chose her friendship with him because, well, Mom’s always gonna love her no matter what and where else could she find a mentor on such short notice?  Fortunately, she was able to spend a week with her big sister at college, with her sister’s friends, away from the situation and able to gain a little perspective.  It was a horrible experience for her, not just to lose her mentor and friend and to upset her mother, but to feel betrayed and used by someone she’d trusted.   Such experiences can taint a romantic  idealist’s view on men, fidelity, and  relationships. 

But for as horrible as the experience was, things changed for her very quickly.  Once she decided not to try to hold onto him either as a friend or a mentor,  new doors opened.  It didn’t take two months, either.  Maybe two weeks.   

Almost immediately after she returned from her visit with her sister, my daughter met a young woman in her 20’s who has become a wonderful new mentor and friend.  This new mentor trades off work with her, shows her new techniques, goes with her on excursions to practice together, lends her equipment, and shows no signs  of subterfuge.  She’s a professional without a lot of experience but a lot of enthusiasm.

My daughter is also now working with a top notch professional less than an hour away, a new mentor who was my best friend as a girl and has recently reconnected with me.  It’s a sweet sense of coming full circle, and I love to watch them working together.  My daughter is learning so much, stretching so far. 

She’s also developed contacts with two more mentors, for specific projects.  I can’t help but grin when I see how happy she is with all these new mentors, each of whom brings something new to her skills and offers exciting new challenges.   Mom is very proud of her, and oh-so-pleased with the new people coming into her life.

 Her cup of mentors runneth over now, and she doesn’t even miss her first mentor.  At all.  Why should she?  She’s far too busy with all these new opportunities.

Water lily photo by  duane.schoon; creative commons license.

Does it sometimes seem that the hardest thing to manifest is your biggest, most important dream?  And isn’t it incredibly frustrating? 

The secret to manifesting is that old phrase about “let go and let God,” but even that can be irritating to hear when what you’re most praying for just isn’t happening.  I’ve discovered that the thing that holds a dream at bay is the “resistance” to it.  That doesn’t sound right because you immediately think of resistance as doing things to keep from getting it, so how can you resist what you want so badly? 

Well, by wanting it so badly.  The secret to getting it is being 100% okay with not having it.  That may sound strange, but it works.  Just as soon as I’m positive I don’t need something, it will show up.  It’s sort of like the Universe saying, “Yes, we just needed you to understand that you are perfect as you are, and since you do, now it’s yours.” 

This resistance might also be considered yearning.  In some cases, it’s downright KEENING for something you want.  You want it so bad that it hurts, and that hurting is resistance that keeps the dream at bay. 

At the April meeting of my spiritual circle, we “played paperdolls,” as my dad would have said.  It was a nice little artsy-craftsy experiment with a powerful lesson.  It’s called “the Box.”

My group sat on my family room floor with a bunch of magazines I’d bought–a variety of men’s magazines, travel guides, financial magazines, health and beauty, you name it.  We took scissors and cut out things that appealed to us and put them in decorated boxes that each person took home.  The object of the game was to find things that represented big dreams and small, even shallow ones for our box and see what would manifest.  According to theory, the items that we don’t have resistance to will manifest quickly.  These are the ones that we’re okay with not coming to us nownownow or even at all because we are all okay 100% without them.  We know we’ll be fine, that we’ll be taken care of, that all is well.  We can put it out to the Universe that we’d like these specific things but we’re just fine, no matter what.  It’s that place of serenity and being at-one with ourselves. 

Different things in my box manifested quickly. This is where the understanding of “resistance” comes in because of how I feel about what–of the box–manifested and how I feel about what has not yet come into physical being for me.  Understanding that feeling is a big clue for me in learning to relax and let things come easily.

Among the things that manifested?   Water lilies!  That was one of the easy, simple things I put in the box.  I saw a photo of water lilies in a garden and tossed it in.  In the past month, those water lilies have been everywhere!  I’ve had the opportunity to snag me a few out in nature, though I haven’t.  I decided I liked them better where they were, and I enjoyed them there very much.  I don’t currently have room in my garden for them but I’ve relished them in the countryside.

Another was a picture of a woman riding a horse through a nature scene.  At the time, I remembered riding horses with my family through the Little Tennessee River in 2003 or so and how much I loved that and would like the opportunity to ride again.  I tossed the picture in the box.  About a week later, I was talking to a woman at work and out of the blue, she suggested I take her husband’s horse while he was out of town and go riding with her one weekend.  I’ve been out of town every weekend, having fun elsewhere, but it’s an open invitation and one I think I’ll take her up on. 

Besides a number of other small items or activities represented by pictures in my box, I put one biggie in there that hasn’t manifested but shades of it keep popping up.  Not the big dream yet, but little things that lead up to its fruition.  It’s almost like having all the accoutrements ready before the actual appearance.

I’ll keep adding things to The Box, and I’ll review them once a month to see what little things I’ve forgotten about have come to be.  That’s really it, you know–putting my desire out there and then just forgetting about it while the Universe delivers it to me in a great big satin bow!

About a month ago, I confided in a spiritual coach of mine that I was afraid of a particular small group doing me harm.  One had already stalked me online.  She suggested that perhaps I might involve the Elephant Gods in a protection ritual to set my mind at ease.  I wasn’t aware of any Elephant God other than Ganesha, and this definitely wasn’t a Ganesha issue.  My friend Murv (M.R. Sellars) suggested the Elephant God known as Dumbo, but that definitely didn’t work.  So I did a little research and found out that in some places, elephants themselves were worshiped as gods.  They can sit on enemies’ chests or carry people to safety.

Hmmmm.  So I incorporated that image of protective elephants into my ritual work and felt much better.

Eventually, a few threats did arise.  That’s when I walked through a store and saw…an elephant.  Or two or three.   Jeweled, wooden, and metal.  Just little knickknacks.  I hadn’t seen them in years but there were a couple of them in different stores.

At first, I wondered if maybe this was a case of selective filtering.  I had elephants on my mind so I was looking for them?  No. Since 1999, I have associated elephants with a former coworker who made my life hell, so I’ve actually found them somewhat distasteful over the years.  When I see one, I remember that I’ve seen one–because I think of that one person.  And it’s been a long, long time since I’ve thought of her.  No, this was something different.  It was exactly 10 days after my adviser had made the suggestion to connect elephants and protection, and just a few days after my ritual.

I took it as a sign and bought a single sparkly elephant on four jeweled legs and put him on the Rock and Gemstone Altar in my living room.   Every time I saw him, I reminded myself that I was protected.

A few days later, I walked through another store and–voila!–an elephant here or there.  I just smiled to myself and reminded myself, again, that I was protected.  Later that day, one of the people I was concerned about bolstered support against me.  I didn’t worry.  Those Elephant Gods were taking care of me!

I returned from a trip out of town last Sunday and first store I walked into, I saw a little elephant statuette.  In the next one, a department store, there were two or three on one aisle.  I just smiled to myself.

Then I walked into a store tonight with my daughter to find her a nicer set of comfy clothes for one a huge wedding photo shoot this weekend and turned the corner to find not one elephant on a shelf but a whole aisle of almost nothing but elephants!

Yeah, I love it when that happens.

And if my stalkers are reading this, well, I wouldn’t advise you go to the circus any time soon.

If you find this review helpful, see the suggested reviews listed at the bottom of this article.

Esther and Jerry Hicks’ The Teachings of Abraham DVD X of the Law of Attraction in Action series, Let Loose!, is a 2-DVD set, a little over 3 hours long, that’s been excerpted from their July 2008 Stamford, CT, Workshop.  I bought it from the Abraham-Hicks website for $30.  HOWEVER, I’ve “attracted” a better deal for you, and you can get it–new–for 1/3rd to 2/3rds of the list price here.  Still, this one was worth the full retail price.

So that I’m not telling you exactly what Abraham advised for every question asked on these DVDs, I’ll tell you areas of concerns I’ve had that were answered for me.  Funny, how that happens.  I don’t have to ask a question myself–the answers will come to me through the questions of others.

My big epiphany during my third listen to this DVD was that it never works for me to match my vibration to someone else’s.  This could simply be said as “stop trying to be what other people want me to be because that’ll just make me miserable.”  If you’ve listened to much of the Teachings of Abraham, that probably seems obvious but it hit me in a way that surprised me.  I may have wanted a relationship with a particular person in the past who shared a vibration and then…didn’t…but any time I ever tried to figure out what was going on with a romantic partner so I could adjust my own view of the world, even subconsciously, the result was disastrous.  I cannot worry about what’s going on in some  silly man’s head because it doesn’t matter.  The only thing that matters is what’s going on in mine, and if the vibration is the same, then life is all the sweeter.

The DVD segment on psychics in many ways echoed one my articles, “3 Reasons Psychics Are Bad for the Law of Attraction–and 1 Good One.”  The Abraham-Hicks approach is a little closer to what I detailed in “3 Keys to Not Giving Away Your Power to Spiritual Advisors,” but with an extended explanation.  I found the description of how a psychic reads vibrational energy to be quite fascinating and worth the price of the entire DVD if you’ve ever visited a psychic, a Tarot reader, or some other intuitive.  For as much work as I’ve done personally on reading the energy of someone else or connecting with them empathically, I now have a much different awareness both of how to help clients I’m coaching to change their world and how to change my own when the predicted future looks bleak.

One of the “hot seat” questions led to a better understanding of a recent difficult time I went through (aka, “contrast”).  The discussion was on asking for help and how sometimes help comes to you and sometimes you are the help for someone else.  Between this segment and another on lawsuits, I found a deeper understanding of some concerns in my life over the past few months.  I’ve noticed on workshop downloads, DVDs, and in the live workshop I attended in Orlando that people in lawsuits really want to know how to pivot to something better-feeling because it seems that nothing like a lawsuit can drag you out of your sweet spot, aka “the Vortex.” The choice seems to be one of whether to continue fighting in a lawsuit because it’s the right thing to do (for various reasons) or to let it go and be free of it.  Hey, these things can be tiring, right?

I’m not in a lawsuit, but I have had to deal with some investigations I never wanted to be involved in.  I had a choice of letting it go and not having to focus on the grueling daily aspects and simply move on or…fight for what I felt was right.  Through this DVD, I was able to see that I may not be “in the Vortex” while putting my efforts into standing up for what’s right, but I do feel a whole lot better than if I let unethical and illegal matters that have affected so many people, plus myself, be swept under the rug. I would feel like a failure, a coward, and a victim if I kept silent.  Instead, I am the one who has been able to help others.  They all asked the Universe/God/The Powers That Be/etc, for help with their situations and I was the one in this tapestry of connections who brought it all together into a design we all understood and could take action on.  I asked the Universe for help in one simple matter and got it, but by sharing my clarity with other interested parties, all their lives have changed.

These were the most pertinent questions this DVD answered for me.  The rest was of good quality, too, and Let Loose! was certainly worth buying, listening to, and sharing with friends.

For the best price I’ve found, buy here.