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.

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.

***

I’ve always hated Jonathon Livingston Seagull.  Irrational, I know, but the Richard Bach book came out around the time I was in the fourth grade, and I remember my teacher reading it to the class and gently (she thought) drilling into us that “If you love something, set it free:  if it comes back to you, it’s yours…if it doesn’t, it never was.”  I hated that quote.  Hated it.

I grew up on a farm with lots of little birds with broken wings that I nursed back to health, and I knew that as soon as I set them free, they would migrate elsewhere and I’d never see them again.  I might wait Spring after Spring to see if they would return, but few ever did.  There was an exception of a hummingbird and a bluebird I saw for a few seasons after I’d held them in my hands and fed them, but by and large, the birds I set free soared far away from me.  And for as much as I loved that moment when they found their flight again, it always saddened me that they never returned.

I never had any problem setting birds free.  Men either.  I don’t like the idea that a man is with me only because I require him to be or a piece of paper requires it or raising a child requires it.   I have always prided myself on giving both a lot of freedom and a lot of loving support in my relationships.  No, for me, the issue has always been more  to the tune of “If you love someone, set him free and wait for him to return.”  That’s generally a no-no when it comes to the Law of Attraction because there’s no surer way to focus on the lack of someone’s presence than to keep thinking of how you’re waiting on them to come back. 

I’m good at waiting, though.  My mom would probably disagree, but I learned that as a child and have never unlearned it.  I’m actually great at waiting.  Fantastic.  I would have made a fine soldier’s wife in the mid-1800’s or maybe even in Roman times when men went off to battle for years and you never knew when or if or under what conditions they would return home.  I’m sure my faith in a man’s promise to return could have rivaled my ancestor who positioned her cooking table toward the window so she could always look up and see if her husband was returning from the Civil War he’d gone off to years before.  (He did return but died 11 days later, so at least she had that.)   So somehow in my mind, I’ve always felt that if you loved someone, you waited for them.

And heaven knows, there’s plenty to wait for, even under the best of circumstances  that don’t include wars, amputation, or death.  People are always going through transitions and transformations and need time to get a firm footing before they can commit to the next step. Many of those times, you want them to have a firm footing instead of making a rash decision that will fall apart immediately.   I’ve been going through my own transition for the past year, as far as my relationship needs.  I think I realized that when I discovered that the second guy in a row was making wedding plans with someone else…who didn’t know about me.  Until that point, the man I loved would ask me to wait for him and make all sorts of promises, and I would wait–because I don’t bail when I love someone…and I had a long marriage to offer as proof of that.

 But at what point do you no longer wait?  And especially when the other person has been selfless enough to pointedly not ask you to wait for him to work through major decisions in his life? 

It’s funny looking back now because this man, an old friend I’d known for my entire professional life  but not one I knew that well personally, re-emerged in my life about the time I realized that my relationship needs had changed.  I needed someone much deeper on the emotional scale, much–how else can I possibly say it?–more intelligent,  more gentlemanly and caring,  more ethics and integrity, even a little more…old-fashioned and sweet and romantic.  The man I’d been seeing for the previous year had met my relationship needs early on but wasn’t anymore, and that all came to a head when I discovered some illegal and unethical behavior on his part.  I dropped  him and never looked back.  It was remarkably easy, probably because he so obviously no longer met my needs.

But I did continue to talk to my old friend here and there, and think nothing of it.  It was a bit of a thrill to discover how much we didn’t know about each other,  how awfully much we had in common, how we seemed to reflect each other’s deepest dreams.  It was easy to spend five hours a day in deep conversation, and yet it wasn’t nearly enough to satiate either of us.  Trust evolved quickly as we discovered a world beneath the surface of the person we’d always just known and admired but never really got to know.  He was a gift from the Gods, a sudden answer to my list of “here’s exactly what I want in a man, even if he’s not 23 and an underwear model.”   

I admit I stopped blogging as frequently because by the time I sat down to write out my insights and viewpoints, all I could do was sigh–I’d already expressed them all and worked through them all with him.  Instead of writing long essays on my world and publishing them to my journals, I wrote long letters to him, shining bright lights on things I’d kept in the dark and receiving his warm, gentle support as he helped me work through some festering old wounds.   I was able to say goodbye to some things I’d held onto for way too long.   

I have some awe-filled new opportunities happening in my life now, and they are largely because of the emotional support, affection, and unrelenting encouragement he has given me on every front for the last few months that pretty much no one else in my life has known about because they would not approve of our friendship.  I was the first person he told when he received devastating news, and his was the only embrace I could find solace in when my doctor, who was wrong, told me he suspected thyroid cancer.   Our relationship has left me alternating between absolutely soaring and feeling as if I just got struck by lightning, sometimes both at once.

And then suddenly he was no longer just a guy I’d known for forever.  He was a close friend.  And then he was my best friend.  And then I was madly in love with him and never saw it coming.  I can’t even say when the shift happened, except that it was a lot earlier than we’d realized. 

So my feelings for him  are on the table.  They have been for quite some time, though not known  to the general public. It’s surprising to me, but it’s the deepest emotional relationship I’ve ever had, one of complete trust and faith in the other,  and probably the one with more promise and joy-potential than any I have ever come within 10 feet of.  But I’m still going through my latest big transition, and I’m so, so, so close….almost done.  And he’s not.  He still has critical decisions to make about his life  and where he’s going with it.  That’s true of many people, but at least he’s aware of it where others are not.  He is now in territory I’m familiar with, and I didn’t pass through it quickly. 

So why is it for the first time in my life that I love someone and I feel I can no longer wait for the other person to get through their transition?  Why do I feel now, where I never have before, that I just can’t wait any longer for him to be at the same point I am?  Even though I have faith in him that he will transform himself in the wonderful ways he wants to, and very soon because I’m seeing the small changes the precede the big ones? 

Maybe it’s because the other men I waited so long for never made it through their transitions, and my biggest fear is that  this one won’t either.

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.

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.

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.

 
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!

There’s an annoying form of money-making out there right now that has brought up some inaccurate concerns about Spilled Candy Books, both from splicing bad info together and by making it difficult to find good info without coming directly to us (in case you’re shy).  It’s called splogging.

Splogs are blogs that have spam qualities.  These are usually created by third parties who’ve never been associated in any way with Spilled Candy or The Spiritual Eclectic—as customers, authors, business partners, even a random visit to our websites. They tend to have a bare-bones look to them and create new blog posts by posting parts of our The Spiritual Eclectic feed and feeds from other blogs that mention us.  They cannot re-post entire copyrighted posts from us, so they post bits and pieces, sometimes out of order and sometimes splicing info from different sources.  There are marketing gurus out there who’ll be happy to sell you a how-to package for $99, and we’ve talked to them for a better understanding.  The splogs hit the search engines (Google is choking on them) and when you type in a keyword for a search, you may well be taken to a splog that mentions your keyword but tries to sell you some affiliate product.  That’s how they make their money, if any—on affiliate products.  So far, I’ve not encountered any splog that makes money from a Spilled Candy book or course.

Where this becomes extremely annoying to me is when a former author reports to me that she read somewhere that I’m selling her out-of-print books at the Spilled Candy/Spiritual Eclectic site and references a splog as the source of the info.  The splog mentions a sale on out-of-print books years ago before they went out of print and we were trying to close out that inventory, plus a current sale on in-print books delivered to Florida instead of back to a warehouse, plus lists several current books.  The info is jumbled together and is an incoherent mess because it’s collated information from different source and different time periods.  I know this because I’m intimately familiar with the material, but now I wonder how often this happens to other publishers, bookstores, authors, bloggers, you name it.  Not to mention that as an author, I grimace when I find entire articles fashioned from my copyrighted words but rearranged and claimed by someone else. Sure, I could challenge it, but just contacting splogs would be more than a full-time job.  Until Google changes its algorithms to filter out splogs, it will be substantially less effective.

So to answer a few questions (these will be incorporated into our FAQ) that we’ve received as a result of splogs in the past few days:

-    Are you selling out-of-print books published by Spilled Candy at The Spiritual Eclectic?

No.  Legally, we do have the right to sell them because our contract gives us the right to sell existing inventory (no new books are printed) and pay our former authors royalties for them.  However, I don’t feel comfortable doing that at this point.  We voluntarily and immediately returned publication rights to those books nearly 3 years ago.  However, some bookstores that have years ago reported sales to us—and for which we paid the authors royalties—have since returned books to our wholesalers and distributors for credit (we don’t get to say no to these), so we do occasionally have out-of-print books shipped back to our home office.  I have refused to sell them because 1.  I’m concerned with how that would look to people who wouldn’t understand why these books are back in our possession (neither do we, frankly) and 2. Some of our former authors have taken their out-of-print books to new publishers and given them new life, which is as we’d hoped, and I don’t want to compete with their new editions by offering a cheap price on an older version.  We originally published many of these books at a time when there were hardly any other options for publishing a great book with a tiny pagan audience—that’s changed in recent years and so have we.

-    If you don’t sell out-of-print books that have been returned to you for credit, what do you do with them?

Initially, we offered them at cost (normally, that’s the actual per book printing costs only, plus postage) to the authors whose books were going out of print or to defray bills for additional books they’d purchased direct from us. That way, the authors could use them to shop the books to a new publisher or as promotions for other books they had coming up. We now donate them to a pagan prison ministry.

-    If you’d change your publishing company to do X or look like Y or focus on Z, I’d send you my manuscript to publish.

If you feel we need to make any changes to be the publisher you want, then we’re not the publisher for you.  That is not a rejection of you or your work.  We simply believe that you have to live by your vision and we have to live by ours.  If they’re not the same, then we would not make good partners. We would not ask you to change yourself or your vision to be what we want you to be, and we expect the same level of respect.  You should absolutely find a publisher who matches your vision—you owe it to your writing efforts to do that—and if we’re not it, so be it.  On both a personal and professional basis, any time I have tried to match my vision to someone else’s instead of staying true to mine, I have been miserable and the other person has been never stayed happy, despite my concessions. We stand by our vision and believe that others who share it 100% will find it just as we believe an author who stands by his or her vision will find a publisher who is a 100% perfect match for it.  That’s the Law of Attraction at its finest.

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.

How did you get here?  I mean, HERE, on this page?  Did you use a keyword or phrase that landed you on this site?  Maybe…

there comes a time in our life

What does it take to trust someone

What does it take to be wanted

What I wish I could say

I thought I’d share with you some behind-the-scenes info about this blog and its readers.  Including the number 1 keyword for the past five-plus years I’ve written for this site and its predecessors.   Big hint:  my top keyword or keyword phrase wasn’t

Spiritual eclectic

Christian witch

eclectic spirituality

spiritual sensitive

law of attraction

Abraham-Hicks

meditations

eclectic pagan

hypnosis

highly sensitive person

Florida Pagan Gathering

Beltane

White witch

I learn more about my audience through the keywords and search terms they use than through their comments,  emails, and private posts via various social networks.  I learn more, too, about human nature and the dynamics of relationships.  Some keywords are hilarious without meaning to be, and others break my heart.  But most of all, people are looking for either 1. Information or 2. Signs.  Sometimes both.  Sometimes desperately.

The Info Seekers:

Plenty of people come here looking for information, particularly on astrology.  I try to post about some application of astrology at least once a week, something a bit unusual.   Because it’s unusual, I get a ton of hits on specific astrological configurations.  This isn’t specifically an astrology blog and it doesn’t aspire to be, but my articles do fill a niche.  The most popular keywords?

Solar Return 8^th House Sun

saturn opposite vertex synastry

transiting saturn conjunct vertex

juno conjunct vertex synastry

vertex synastry

hades and the Uranian planets

juno conjunct venus

vertex conjunct Jupiter

vertex conjunct Venus

Vertex conjunct ascendant

Vertex conjunct Mars

Vertex conjunct Sun

Anti-Vertex conjunct Sun

Others seek information on spirituality, intuition, and empathy. About 25% buy a spiritual or life coaching book from the Recommended Reads page.

empathic abilities

empathic connections

pagan homeschooling

Prayer to get rid of negativity

Psychic connections between lovers

Tut letters from the Universe

Salt and fire cleansing

Fifth chakra exercises

A particular niche I appeal to are specifically looking for information on dominance and submission—about 75% purchase the Control Your Submissive Boy ebook  or print version on their way out:

submissive boy

male submission

male submission spirituality

submissive husband

dominant woman

controlling your submissive husband

Readers looking for information on the Law of Attraction find plenty of material, and since most are specifically hoping to attract back a lost love,  about 50% purchase the Attract Him Back ebook as they leave the site AND about 85% keep coming back for new Law of Attraction stories and books.

law of attraction let go

law of attraction relationships

law of attraction specific person

attracting him back

attract past lover back

old lovers reunited

The Sign Seekers:

They already know the answers to their keywords—“Is he cheating on me?”  or “Is he leading me on?” or “Is he in love with someone else?” or “Will he ever leave his wife?”—but they’re still looking for a reason to trust their intuition.  My articles apparently give them the answer they’re looking for outside of themselves when they don’t trust what’s inside themselves.

These are the readers who tend to write me long, highly personal letters I don’t publish in the comments section—because they are too, too personal.   They pour out their hearts and tell me their stories.  Almost every one of these letters is about a relationship.  They already know, even though none of them seem to have been able to admit it before, where the relationship is headed and it’s usually not a loving, healthy direction.  They are looking for a sign, and that sign is simply anything I might write that triggers the knowledge in them that they know the answer to the question.  So many of these readers, I just want to throw my arms around and say, “Sweetie, if you’re looking through 100 websites for definitive lists of how to know he’s cheating on you so that maybe he’s not doing one thing on somebody’s fool-proof list, you already know the truth.  If you still can’t recognize what your intuition is telling you—or you do but don’t want to listen to it–then even seeing a photo of him in the act with a paramour is not going to convince you of what you’re not ready to see, and you’re just going to keep right on torturing yourself and wondering if you’re crazy because you don’t have concrete proof.”  Those are the ones that are heartbreaking for me, and I can’t say that I feel good about letters that thank me for helping them to see the light.

These readers aren’t looking for information—they are looking for signs to validate their intuition.

And the winner is….

Which brings me to the #1 search keyword or phrase that readers use to find my site or to find something on my site—in all their variations.

(man’s first and last name)

(man’s first and last name) (my name)

(my name) (man’s first and last name)

(man’s first and last name) engaged

(man’s first and last name) (his business’ name)

(man’s first and last name) Lane Bryant store

(man’s first and last name) (woman’s name)

(man’s first and last name) (another woman’s name)

(man’s first and last name) can I trust him

(man’s first and last name) lying cheating scumbag

Yes, I’d love for a spiritual keyword or phrase to be the top term used but if it isn’t, at least I’m staying amused.

The labyrinth at the Florida Pagan Gathering at dusk–a powerful maze for contemplation. The best thing about labyrinths is that you just let your feet follow the path and your mind flies to more spiritual planes.  Photo Copyright by Lorna Tedder; all rights reserved.

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

My 17-year-old sprawls across the passenger seat, her injured foot on the dashboard, and she cuddles against her pillow.  Her mood is that of a wounded kitten, and she’s withdrawn rather than her usual outgoing and delightful self.

I don’t understand how I could have manifested this,” she whimpers.

She’s not talking about her foot.

Her foot injury is a simple accident that resulted in a lot of pain, soreness, and blood–and hopefully not a broken toe.  That happened as we were leaving four days of camping and festival-making in the Ocala National Forest.  The throbbing foot was the icing on the cake, a culmination of her frustrations.  Easy to see how that one manifested.

Instead, she’s talking about how much she’d looked forward to this festival–for weeks–only to wind up feeling shut-down by people she’d admired because of a new policy put in effect that felt like a gut-punch rejection.  We’d both been so thrilled about this trip that we were thrown off-kilter by a series of events that left her tearful and me pissed off on her behalf.  Of all the camping trips we’ve been a part of since 2006, this was probably the worst for us–and the only one where we considered leaving a day early  and finally left for home feeling low instead of amped.  Considering that we’ve attended past festivals when my dad was dying and also right after two big heartbreaks, that’s saying something.  What saved the trip for us was being involved with particular circles of friends as well as some great workshops and talks.  The downers were all specific to a policy that affected her, one where she’d followed the rules  100% and the rules were changed on her mid-way.  Not her fault and no way to change minds …which was another reason we took it so hard.  We had no control over a hurtful situation.

As she sleeps and I drive for six hours, I start trying to figure it out for myself.  How exactly did this manifest when we’d left for the trip exuberant about the possibilities?  The present situation, simply, boils down to legalities involving a minor child and her professional photography.  It involves being told she’s misunderstood, it involves feeling coerced into agreeing that what she’s told is okay, and it involves her having to be the bearer of disappointing news.  It involves her being pulled into the politics of adults and, to some extent, being pitted against her mother.   Funny, but that’s incredibly familiar, isn’t it?

Different characters, different setting, but the same elements of plot and theme.  It’s a replay of a situation that has not yet fully resolved.  We’re still repeating that pattern, that “vibration” of six weeks ago, and it’s still an active pattern that we haven’t broken, even though we thought we were done with it.

Six weeks ago, Aislinn was pulled into a situation that left me equally as angry at seeing her put in the middle of what should have been between adults.  The past situation, simply, boiled down to the questionable legality–and definitely the ethics–of involving my minor child and her professional photography talents in someone else’s deceptive activities.   She was told she’d misunderstood (about me), felt she had no choice but to agree and keep quiet, and left to be the bearer of disappointing news that should have been delivered by an adult.  She was put in a predicament where she was pitted against her mother, and Mom was very unhappy about that, enough so to involve authorities.

The past situation of six weeks ago isn’t just in Aislinn’s vibration but it’s still in mine.  I recognized that almost immediately–a month ago at least.  My part of the past situation is more personal than professional, and though I can immediately end a relationship with a long-term liar with multiple girlfriends who don’t know about each other, I cannot immediately change my entire vibration so that I don’t repeat it. How did I recognize my vibration?  Easy–all I had to do was look at what was going on around me.

The first two guys to approach me about dinner dates were already encumbered and lying through their teeth about it.   One was married, according to his social networking site, but “getting a divorce,” according to him.  I didn’t just take his word for it.  I quizzed him about whether she knew they were getting a divorce and golly-gee-whiz, but she’s on a business trip and he’s planned to talk to her about it when she gets home.  The other guy, when pressed for details about the girlfriend shown on his social networking site, became quite cagey.  About 3 hours before we were to meet for dinner, he finally told me that he was on his way to see her to break up with her (he hadn’t already as he’d sworn) and he’d see me afterward at dinner.  Wow, thanks, dude!

I decided not to date anyone new for a little while, until this pattern of lying scumbags had passed.  When I ventured out again, I met a seemingly sweet man who said all the right things–and like the last man in my life, went to great lengths (oooh, I mean the last two men in my life) to keep his girlfriend a secret on his social networking sites and somehow failed to mention her except eventually to refer to her as a “friend.”  Sheesh, isn’t it exhausting to walk such tight ropes?  These guys could probably produce enough electricity to fuel North America if they spent their energy on positive works rather than deception.  The highlight of their lies is that almost every time, their other girlfriends turn into crazy stalker chicks who feel the need to blame me for their men not being truthful with them or with me.  In the end, they end up with their liars and not me–and that’s not a bad thing at all.

So in looking around at the men I’m still meeting, that pattern of liars is still there for me.  And my fix for that is to not date, to not get involved, to just keep things easy and single for a while.  Kinda gives new meaning to the term sucka-free, doesn’t it?

But the pattern is still there for Aislinn, too.  How to fix it?  Maybe she’ll break her pattern by not offering or not being talking into offering her photography skills for free, whether they’re paid for later or not.  Or maybe she’ll just make sure her skills are really wanted and appreciated.  I don’t know.  Given the good heart she has, it would be far harder for me to convince her not to volunteer for the next photography project that arises for a good cause than it is for me to decide to forgo men for a while.

When the current pattern has finished playing itself out, then I think we’ll both be free to be appreciated to our full extent.

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

You wouldn’t let your last boyfriend–the one with all the drama and problems–choose your next boyfriend, would you?  Yet that’s what most of us do without realizing it.

Whenever I’ve been single in my life, particularly after being married, supposedly smarter people than me are great at unsolicited advice like  “Just ask the Universe to bring you the right guy” or “You should pray for God to pick the perfect person for you.”  Well, duh.  These people also tend to have been married to the same person for a couple of decades and just looooooovvvvve telling others how to be as miserable as they are.  Yes, they amuse me.

But their advice isn’t all bad.  It makes perfect sense, yet in recovery from the last break-up, we don’t so much choose to let the next guy to come to us be exactly what we need as we do hope they’re not what we had last time.  In that sense, we look for, seek out, attract to us a guy with key features that are the opposite of what we just endured.  And we try like crazy not to keep attract the same kind of guy as last time while actively seeking something better.   Better equals opposite, you see.    That doesn’t bring us the perfect guy for us–it brings us a guy with a different set of drama than the last one.

For example, after dealing with a romantic partner wasn’t very romantic, wild passion was definitely what I looked for in the next man.   The key factor missing from my  previous relationship instantly narrowed my dating pool to a few teaspoons of men who were the opposite of where I’d been, regardless of their other issues.  I got wildly passionate–and tons of drama and him sobbing in my arms.  So the next time I was open to a romantic partner, I specifically asked the Universe to bring me a guy who was happy and drama-free.

I got that, too.  Of course, he was happy and drama-free (seemingly) because he was leading at least two secret lives and delivering a daily performance that’s just got to be worthy of a suspense thriller in my future as a novelist.

After that, it was easy enough to set my intentions for a new romantic partner who isn’t living a life worthy of a whole week of guest starring on Jerry Springer, but I decided not to.  Instead of looking for people who aren’t anything like the last guy, I reset my intentions.  The next special guy who settles in for some extended good times with me doesn’t have to have the opposite traits of all my past partners.

Nope, he just has to match to me, not to what I didn’t have in the past.

When I attended my very first live Abraham-Hicks workshop, two women seated near me asked if I’d bought the Telling a New Story! DVD yet.  I wasn’t even aware until then that there were DVD’s.  I’d been exposed to the books and audio downloads, but wasn’t aware of how many other products were available for someone like me who hungers for deeper knowledge.   The two raved about how great this 3-hour DVD set was for them so I decided to buy it and give it a try myself.  Then I decided to review more of the Abraham-Hicks products as a regular part of The Spiritual Eclectic blog.

Esther and Jerry Hicks’ The Teachings of Abraham DVD IX of the Law of Attraction in Action series, Telling a New Story!, is a 2-DVD set, a little over 3 hours long, that’s been excerpted from their January 2009 Mexican-Riviera Cruise Workshop.  Though I had the opportunity to buy it at the live workshop for $30, I had a 7-hour drive home and opted to buy several CD’s instead.   After I got home, 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 children are not so young now that I have to tell them very carefully about their heritage to avoid nightmares.  They’re young adults now, but I still want to protect them from all the boogie men out there and remind them of what I myself have witnessed and insist they learn from me.  I’ve wondered before how you can tell your children or teens about horrific events in our spiritual heritage and even in our genealogy without having them focus on finding more of the same pattern in everyday life.  I’ve seen it often with racial, gender,  and spiritual prejudices, where people begin to look for, to strive to find, examples of the prejudices they are so certain are there.    Abraham answers a mother’s question about her ethnic heritage and ends with a rousing explanation of Martin Luther King’s dream.  My daughter walked in while I was listening to this segment and we were both frozen in motion as we listened, awed.  Beautifully done!

Another question I’ve struggled with both for myself and in discussions with my nearly grown daughters is one of choosing “a” career.  My children were expected by their school systems to pick the one career choice that would satisfy them for the rest of their lives…at age 13.  I used to shake my head over the idea.  Technology alone will render many current career choices obsolete between age 13 and even entering college–and provide many more options.  They’ve both wondered how to find that perfect career to leave college with when they have so many things they want to do and be.  I’m certainly past the age of choosing a first career, but I too still want more than one career and never know where the next “rocket of desire” will take me.

Teaching children about the Law of Attraction at different ages made me think,  as well as distinguishing between yearning and desire.

Another segment that I found meaning was how to stop looking at certain purchases I wanted to make as selfish, while other financial exchanges of equal or greater amounts are acceptable to me because of connotations I’ve placed on them, such as charitable gifts or any type of purchase that directly helps someone in need.  I had never thought about the flow of money in quite the way it was explained.

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

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

In Esther and Jerry Hicks’ The Teachings of Abraham DVD IX of the Law of Attraction in Action series, Telling a New Story!, Abraham says that the best way we can teach our children to become “aligned” is by the example of our own alignment.  That may be true, but with my own kids, I seem to learn quite a bit about myself and my own alignment by watching them.

Shannon, now 20, was first aggressively exposed to the Law of Attraction when she was 16.  For her, there was already a lot of resistance in play.  She’d certainly seen enough in my life!  Early on, a lot of my own practice took the route of bringing to me exactly what I didn’t want, and I wasn’t quite as good at it then.  I wasn’t as serene or positive as I am now.  Still, I’ve been amazed over the past year at watching her manifest.  She’s gotten the hang of it far more than she gives herself credit for.

The most fun I’ve had watching her manifest was when she wanted a different place to live and made a list of 30+ rather unusual things she wanted–tile downstairs with carpet upstairs, a screened patio,  a big kitchen, a front porch, vaulted ceilings, two bedrooms, three bathrooms, a townhome/house, a safe area, close to work/grocery/shopping/gym, some utilities included, pets okay, washer/dryer included, a peaceful atmosphere conducive to study, close to campus–oh, the list went on and on, and all cheaper than her current, noisy, small, 3-roommate apartment with negligent managers and elephants for upstairs neighbors and drug dealers across the hall.   That was a slightly rocky time, when the perfect place–or even a dingy imperfect place– was not turning up.  Just when it seemed she might be tenting somewhere while her current lease ran out and her third roommate bowed out of plans to room together for another year, she discovered that her lease erroneously included another month and she had another month’s time to find…home.  She knew it when she saw it from the outside–absolutely the perfect spot, even before she saw the inside and all of the features she’d put on her wish list.  She’s been happily ever since.  And to me, it reminds me a lot of the little house she lived in when she was three.

I’ve watched her manifest all sorts of things in the past year that have me awed, even though she sometimes forgets how well she does this.  I’ve seen her fret over getting research projects and opportunities that just seemed to fall into her lap and provide a delicious landmark on her career path.  I’ve seen her bring incredible internship and symposium opportunities to her where she was pursued when, logically, such opportunities shouldn’t have been there for her at so young an age.  It’s fun to watch, though I recognize she still has some resistance at times, and I recognize it because I’ve so often been in that same spot and I feel she mirrors my own methods of manifesting (or not) at times.

With Aislinn, I’m mostly just amazed at her manifesting skills.  She’s really, really gotten the hang of it.  At barely 17, things manifest very quickly for her.

She was first exposed to the Law of Attraction at 13, and I honestly regretted it.  No sooner had she watched The Secret for the first time, than she did what many  did when they first jumped on the Law of Attraction bandwagon (and soon after fell off).  She rushed to her bedroom and taped a dollar bill to her ceiling, over her bed, so she could focus on…MONEY!  I really disliked where she took her focus, which was all about money, shopping, stuff. Not that stuff is necessarily bad, but she was at a materialistic stage in life and bought into the get-rick-quick hype that later made the Law of Attraction the focus of the general public in the 2007 time frame.  She wasn’t old enough yet to understand all the other things she can attract to her.

When she was 16, I began to see big changes in her, and she began to listen in discreetly while I played audiobooks at home, putting what she heard into play.  Many of these audiobooks and downloads were Abraham-Hicks offerings, which gave a more spiritual, self-improvement bent to the Law of Attraction than so much of the money-money-money-themed products out there. She began to change the way she handled herself, finding alignment more quickly, not focusing on the past as I have often done.  She began actively listening to the Abraham-Hicks workshops on her iPod on 12-hour bus trips to forensics competitions.  She started actively setting her intentions and then checking them off as they happened, with seemingly little to no effort at all.

I’ve seen this with her change  in schools 15 months ago to a place where she has blossomed and is appreciated for who she is.  I’ve seen it with her grades and classes and career plans.  I’ve seen it most of all with her photography business. I’m am still blown away that she is a junior in high school with 7 weddings to shoot in the next year and more appointments than she can comfortably handle.

In many ways, it seems easier for them than for me to let go and manifest their dreams.  They don’t have the years…the decades…of ingrained resistance that I have.  It makes me so excited as a mom to see them catching on so early in life.  And, it’s a great reminder to reach back to my early childhood, to the times when I could play freely and play creatively before I succumbed to the resistance and structure of the world around me.  That’s not a bad thing, though.  My life leading up to now has given me a lot of “contrast” and because of so much of it, so young, I’m now very sure of who I am and what I want.