And The Prime Murder Suspect Is ….

The lab is still closed, barred by crime scene tape now.  All that’s left of Ms. Feel Good is a chalk outline on the floor.

At the moment, the murder suspects are Anger, Fear, and Pathetic … oh, and Too Much Left Brain is in the running too.

Here’s where my left brain has hung me up:

In order to believe in this experiment, to start it up again and stay committed to it, I have to believe in the premise underlying the experiment.  Like I’ve said in past posts, I don’t have all the time in the world to mess around with this.  I have two months, and I need to use them well.

So if I’m not going to use those two months to do the logical things—i.e, DO (take physical action) whatever it takes to bring money in, I have to believe that the nonphysical path of feeling good to align myself with source energy to vibrate into a match with what I want (ala Abraham-Hick’s teachings), is a viable option.

And there’s one little problem with me believing this.

My husband, Tim, as I’ve mentioned, absolutely KNOWS he’s going to win a lottery.  He feels like he’s already won one.  He says he feels relaxed and exhilarated at the same time (we coined a new word for that—exhileraxation).  When he walks in the public forest here in our town, in his mind, he’s walking on our own property, the property we want to buy when he wins that lottery.  He has no money worries at all.  He doesn’t live in our “reality.”  He lives in his own.

This is exactly what you need to do to create a vibrational match with something you want—you have to find the place of feeling like you already have it.

Abraham-Hicks aren’t the only teachers who say this.  Neville wrote about it in the 1950’s and 60’s.  It was in The Secret. Lottery winner, Cynthia Stafford’s inspiration, author Joseph Murphy teaches this.

Friday evening, our good friends came over (I will call them Tilly and Pam).  We talked about the law of attraction and the role of energy vibration in creating your reality.  Pam asked me if I’ve read any of Gregg Braden’s books.  I have:  The Divine Matrix—Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief. She says she was listening to one of his books on tape, and she’d just listened to him tell the story of visiting the Hopi Indians and going out into the desert with one of the elders in the tribe.  They went out to pray for rain.  The elder went behind a rock and closed his eyes for a few minutes then came back and said it was done.  Braden, who apparently had been expecting some kind of ceremony or dance or something, was surprised and asked what the elder did.  The elder said he simply felt like it had already rained.  He imagined the feel of it on his skin, the smell of it, how the muddy earth felt oozing between his toes.  And sure enough, it rained.

The universe responds to our thought, and when our thought comes from a place of knowing (because we feel like we have what we desire), we match up with the energetic vibration of what we desire and it is ours.  That’s how it works.

But …

Back to where I’m hung up:  Tim has been doing exactly what you’re supposed to do.  Every Abraham-Hicks book I’ve read (I’ve read eight of them) says that once you find alignment with “who you really are” (the nonphysical part of you), as evidenced by your feeling good, you will experience shifts in your life in “just a few days.”  They say that once you have found this alignment that which you do not desire cannot make its way to you.  If you feel rich, you will experience the evidence of this alignment about money in the form of “some financial relief.”

So where is Tim’s financial relief?  Why do we still get creditor phone calls?  Why hasn’t money come his way?  How can he have gotten us in this situation if he feels so rich?

Tim has felt rich for a very long time, so where is his money?

This bugs me.

If you decide to follow a certain path, it’s nice to know that the path goes to where you want it to go.  I wouldn’t, for instance, get on Interstate 5, which runs north and south along the west coast, and expect it to take me to Washington D.C.  I also wouldn’t go on a diet that a friend followed perfectly without experiencing any weight loss at all.

So Tim’s alignment actually bothers me.  He should be experiencing financial shifts by now.  Shouldn’t he?

Tim says he’s not going to pay attention to the fact that his reality hasn’t matched up with his virtual reality yet because the minute he does that, he’s out of alignment.  He’s right.

But (again) …

One way to tell if you’re in alignment is to see what’s manifesting in your life.

Sigh.

A wise friend sent me an e-mail this morning and said I have to let Tim do his thing (win the lottery) while I do mine.  She told me her sister had watched an Oprah show about lottery winners, and one of the winners kept telling his wife he was going to win—she didn’t believe him, but then he did.  So there you go.  She’s write—I even wrote about this in a previous post.

It’s tough, though, to believe in a process that doesn’t seem to be working all that well for the person you’re living with.

So Ms. Feel Good is still in the morgue.  I’m working on ways to resurrect her.  I haven’t found the magic yet …….

Did I Walk Past The Pot Of Gold?

On that rocky beach where Tim and I walked on Tuesday, a rain shower shoved aside the sun and left behind its colorful signature.

Only moments before, we had walked right through the place where that rainbow touched down.  I’d never seen a rainbow’s end so clearly before … and one I’d just walked past.

Was there a pot of gold that I missed?

Am I missing one in my life now?

Tim told me on Tuesday that our pot of gold was waiting for us at home (he said he was going to win the lottery that night).

Maybe it’s someplace close by.  But I don’t see it yet (he didn’t win).

So maybe the joy is in the rainbow, not what’s at the end of it.

Waiting For The Sand

On Tuesday, Tim and I drove up the coast to a beautiful beach with magnificent rocks rising from the waves.

We set out for a walk along the ocean.  We let Ducky off the leash to run, explore, … and chew on logs.

Although the view was stunning, the walking was challenging.  The beach was covered with a thick layer of smooth small rocks that grabbed at our feet and turned our ankles.  I was especially tentative as we picked our way over the rocks because I’m still recovering from a severely broken ankle and have NO desire to break it again.

Even though the going was slow and rough, we kept on.  We could see an outcropping headland in the distance, and we wanted to get to it.

It took us an hour and fifteen minutes to cover that distance.  While Tim and Ducky explored the larger rocks at the headland, I perched on a log and watched the ocean froth and surge.   Finally, we turned and headed back.  I wasn’t keen on all that struggling through rock for another hour and fifteen minutes, but what choice did we have?

But wait …

While we’d been walking, the tide had been receding.  And the ocean’s retreat revealed a new place to walk … on hard, only somewhat rocky sand.

Ahhhh.

It only took us 40 minutes to make the return trek.

Just because the path is rocky now doesn’t mean it will stay that way.  I’m holding onto this because right now, I’m looking for purchase on rocky ground … and I’m waiting for the sand.

Wolf Moon

Can the moon inspire the right choices?  Can it help us come into alignment with our higher self?

The moon is the object of endless lore and romance.  What if the pull of the moon can impact our personal energy?

The moon will be full tonight for the first time this year.  A “wolf moon,” so-named by Native Americans because hungry wolves howled at the full moon on cold winter nights, tonight’s moon will be something special.  It will be the biggest and brightest full moon of the year.  Why?

The moon’s orbit around Earth is an ellipse.  One side of the orbit is 31,070 miles (50,000 km) closer than the other.  When the moon reaches this closest point to us, it’s called a perigee.  Once or twice a year, the perigee coincides with a full moon, as it will tonight.  This is what will make the moon 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter tonight than lesser full Moons the rest of the year.

This full moon has already affected the tides—our beaches are littered with logs, and the ocean has been bellowing at us for days.  If the moon has that power, couldn’t it affect our energy too?  Aren’t we made mostly of water?

I used to wish on the moon when I was a little girl.  Maybe I should do it again.  And tonight would be the night.

Let’s check out the moon tonight and ask the universe to help us achieve alignment with our inner selves.  As a bonus, look for Mars—the reddish, star shape will be just to the left of the moon tonight.

My Lab Design Quandary

I’m standing at the threshold of my demolished lab.  I’ve stopped moaning.  Clean up is done.

But how do I redesign this lab?  What should I put in it?

My goal for this experiment was to find ways to feel good, to make feeling good my top priority.  The hypothesis:  feeling good aligns us with our nonphysical self and alignment with our nonphysical self (or inner being) is what puts us in vibrational alignment with what we desire.  Being in alignment with what we desire is how we get what we want.  In other words, to create your reality, you find ways to feel good.  That’s the working hypothesis.

I’m undertaking this experiment in conditions that are less than ideal.  The best time, I think, to do such an experiment is when things are going pretty well for you already, and you want to see if they can go better.

The worst time to undertake an experiment like this is when you are in dire straits of one kind or another, when your financial security rides on proving your hypothesis.  And of course, this is the situation I’m in.

When I say design my lab, I mean, what do I do while I’m feeling good?

I had a design plan when I put this experiment together.  My lab looked like this:  finish a book proposal for a memoir I wanted to write then get well-paying jobs as a freelance writer or editor.  I liked this design because it allowed me to enjoy the feeling of having some money coming in so I could let go of the need to have Tim do what he says he’s going to do:  win a lottery.

I liked this design.  It helped me be in that feel good place that is necessary for my experiment.

What blew up my lab was finding out that getting those well-paying jobs is about as difficult, if not more so, than winning the lottery.  In spite of my 25 years of writing, editing, and coaching/teaching experience, in spite of my published books, I am just one of thousands and thousands of writers clamoring for jobs, and since most of these writers are willing to work for sunflower seeds (.01 cents per word in many cases), getting the kind of wage I desire is nearly impossible.

So what do I do now?

Here are my design choices as I see them and how they make me feel:

1. Go ahead and scramble for these jobs.  Work as many hours as I can to bring in a couple thousand dollars in a month, if possible.  This choice feels miserable.  I HATE this choice.  It’s just one step up from applying for a job at McDonald’s (no offense to McDonald’s or people who work there—it’s my purgatory, but that’s just a personal thing).
2. Sit back, relax, and do whatever seems fun while KNOWING that Tim will win that lottery.  This choice makes me feel very anxious because I don’t KNOW that Tim will win, and if he doesn’t, we’re screwed (as in have to sell our house and move in with my parents or something).
3. Write another book proposal for another memoir idea I have or for another novel.  This idea doesn’t feel good either because I know that the speed of the publishing world will make it impossible to sell anything I might write by the end of March (even less possible than winning the lottery)
4. Throw all my energy into building the readership of this blog to a point where I can monetize it with ads.  This choice feels about as tenuous as choice number two.  I have no idea how I’d get this blog to a readership of 100,000 or more devoted readers, which is what it would need to be before I even thought about monetizing it.  It feels no more possible to do this in two months than it does to win a lottery.

As you can see, none of my design choices light me up.  None of them make my heart sing.  Abraham says they wouldn’t move forward with a course of action until it made their heart sing.

So what do I do now?

How do I paint this lab of mine?

How do I feel good when I don’t know what to do next?

Maybe I’m making this too difficult.  Maybe I’m missing choices that are right there for me to see but I don’t see them.

Right now, what I’m trying to do is look for things I have now that make me feel good, doing that and not thinking about the future or what design choice I need to make.

I feel better than I did yesterday, but I don’t feel good.

So the experiment is still stalled.

Anatomy Of A Lab Explosion

The experiment is perking along.  The scientist is gathering data.  All is well in Labsville.

But then …

The monkey gets out of his cage and frees the rats and the mice.  The rats and the mice turn on all the Bunsen burners.  The animals break the glass and escape.  The flames ignite chemicals in glass vials all over the lab.  Ka-BLAM!  The lab explodes.

What does the scientist do?

She wails and moans (surely).  She cleans up (hopefully).  And she starts over (if she’s determined.

Welcome to my destroyed lab.

I’m somewhere between the wail and moan phase and the clean-up phase.

My lab isn’t a place full of monkeys and rats and mice.  It has no Bunsen burners or vials of chemicals (though certain chemicals could be helpful at this point J).

My lab is life.  And the experiment was:  make my top priority finding reasons to feel good to see if feeling good is the secret to creating the life you desire.

In order to test my hypothesis, one element must be in place.  I MUST feel good.

Yesterday, I stopped feeling good about noon.  I tried to find relief and get back to feeling good.  I stopped and wrote about Ducky.  I used the chi machine.  I had a healthy, yummy meal with Tim and we talked about things we want.

I still didn’t feel better.

I looked around the house at things I appreciate.  I cuddled with Ducky.  Tim and I watched a show that makes us feel good (Extreme Home Makeover).  I still didn’t feel good.

In fact, the more I tried to feel good, the worse I felt.

I was sucked back into the previous year, remembering how I felt at the start of last year, thinking that the year was so filled with promise.  We’d received this great insurance settlement.  We were fixing up the house.  I thought I had months of freedom and time ahead of me to do my writing without pressure.  I thought we were on the verge of something amazing.  Truly, I did.

Then in August, I discovered my sense of freedom was an illusion.  We had no money and all our credit cards were charged to the hilt.  I went from happy and focused to devastated and confused.

Now, we get 10 to 20 creditor calls a day.  They’re like little Red Alert sirens going off in the background, yanking me out of my everything’s-going-to-be-okay place.

The books and screenplays I’ve written are stalled on someone’s desk—no sales yet.

And yes, I know I’m telling it like it is, not like how I want it to be.  Which is why I feel so lousy.

I got hung up on the intentions, I think.  Abraham says to intend your way through your day—they call it segment intending:  decide what you want before you go into each part of your day.  I’ve tried this many times off and on through the last few years.  I’ve yet to have a day go the way I intended it to go.  So I get pissed off (I don’t think that’s part of the process).

Then there’s that placemat process—you put on one side of the page what you’ll absolutely do that day and on the other side of the page, you write down what you want the universe to do.  I’ve done that many times too, and I’ve yet to have the universe do anything on its list.

Still, I’m a determined woman.  So yesterday, I tried again.  I got up and intended that I’d easily find a freelance writing opportunity, one that paid well.  I’d apply and get the job and I’d be on track to make enough money to give us some security while Tim gets himself lined up with that lottery he keeps telling me he feels like he’s won.  I put getting me those jobs on the universe’s side of the to do list.

By late afternoon, I was slogging through 38 pages of how-to-use-Elance so I could take a stupid test on how to use their site, and I was NOT having a good time.  I was having a MISERABLE time.  It didn’t feel good at all.  I tried to find a new attitude.  All new attitudes were in hiding.

Everything came crashing down on me.  This is NOT the life I envisioned.  I’m on the verge of 50 years old.  I’ve worked for 20 years to be a successful writer.  I thought I had it made when I broke into the big publishing world.  I sold books and was sure my career was taking off.  I was wrong.  I threw every bit of my energy into building a business.  I failed.  I thought I understood how to attract what I wanted, and I attracted a freak accident that left me with a permanent limp and an ankle that hurts pretty much all the time.

I’m PISSED OFF!!!!!

Ka-BLAM!  That’s when the lab exploded.

So much for feeling good.

I cried off and on all evening.  Even Ducky’s sweet attempts to comfort me (head on my shoulder, little tail wags, a nose to my neck that said, “I’m here; it’s okay.”) didn’t help.

Abraham and many spiritual writers talk about what Abraham calls “the path of least resistance.”  This means that for all you do, you find the path that feels the best.  Trust your gut, your instinct.  You know when a course of action feels good and when it doesn’t.

But what if neither course of action feels good?  What if you can’t find one that feels good?

There’s where I am.  That’s the monkey that started all the mischief in my lab.

Scrabbling for these writing jobs doesn’t feel good.  Call me a writing snob, but I’ve worked too hard for too long and developed a skill set that is too valuable to be jumping through hoops so I can bid on projects that don’t compensate me well enough.  I HATE the idea.  I HATE the process.  It makes me feel yucky and very, very small.  It makes me feel like a failure.

And yes, I know that nothing can MAKE me feel anything.  So, I’ll rephrase that.  I am allowing myself to feel small and like a failure.

So my other choice is to keep churning out book proposals because I enjoy doing that, even though I know none of these can lead to a sale within the time I need such a sale.  I need money coming in before April to stave off disaster.  The book industry doesn’t move that fast unless you’re a celebrity in the middle of a scandal or a criminal who’s done something heinous and gotten away with it.

So that path doesn’t feel right.

Do I just enjoy myself—return to my drawing and piano playing and walking my dog and taking long baths and trust that Tim won’t let me down?  Believe that he’ll win that lottery?

But I don’t believe that he’ll win in the next two months.  I know it’s POSSIBLE—but do I feel like I can count on it?  No way.  He’s been telling me he’s going to win for over two years.  Why would he finally do it now?

So that path doesn’t feel right.

Are there other paths?  Probably, but I don’t see them now.

Sell the house, move to another place and get a job.  HATE that idea.

I love my house and where I live.  I had this place built to my specifications.  I created this lifestyle.  When I think about leaving it, I feel like I’m going to throw up.  That’s not a feel good path, obviously.

So what is my path of least resistance?  I thought I had it figured out.  Get freelance work.

Yesterday I found out that the path to freelance work doesn’t feel good either.

So I’m stuck.

And that’s why my lab exploded.

My goal was to feel good for 30 days and see what that brought me.  I didn’t even last 11 days.  Experiment tainted.  Data in ashes.

What do I do?

Start over.

I must.

But what’s the path that leads me to that feel good place?

I don’t know yet.

So for right now, I’m moaning and cleaning up.

Turning My Boat

A couple weeks ago, I had this idea to look for freelance writing and editing work online.  I did a preliminary search of the opportunities in this area and found a couple sites that looked worth signing up for.  I decided to get my Puppies Interrupted proposal done before I went further.

So yesterday, Tim and I had an incredible day celebrating the 9^th anniversary of the day he arrived in my town and moved in with me.  I had no trouble feeling good all day—it was a pure feel-great day!

I got up this morning feeling energized and upbeat.  Ducky and I had a great walk by the bay (more on that in a second).  I came home and went to work signing up for the sites.

I’ve been signing up for sites and looking for jobs for three hours now, and I don’t feel good at all.

I’m trying to find a way to feel good about this, but at the moment, having an oh-boy-I’m-a-published-author-who-has-worked-her-tail-off-to-create-financial-and-creative-success-and-now-I-have-to-scrounge-for-a-job-woo-hoo feeling is basically beyond me.

Today’s Abraham quote included this:

“We would never move forward in the face of negative emotion.”

I have a container-ship-load of negative emotion right now.  Moving forward with my job search, therefore, is counterproductive.

I started this freelance search with enthusiasm for the idea of bringing in some regular income working at home doing what I love to do and am good at (i.e., writing).  But the more I’ve searched, the worse I’ve felt.  Most of the work I’ve found isn’t work I feel excited about.  The process of applying for it is lengthy and time-consuming.

I want to write my own books.

I want to sell the ones I’ve written.

I want to be free to choose my projects.

Wah, wah, wah.

NI, NI, NI.

I feel discouraged, frustrated, angry, and sad.  Yuck

I feel ashamed and embarrassed that after all I’ve accomplished in my field, I’m going after work I don’t even want just to survive financially.

I KNOW there’s a better way to look at this.

Abraham has this upstream/downstream analogy about life:  when you let go of the oars and flow downstream (i.e. feel good, thereby aligning with your inner self), you easily float to all you desire; when you row hard upstream (work, struggle and feel bad in the process), you’re moving away from what you desire.

My boat is definitely headed upstream right now.

So, because the negative emotion isn’t helping me with the process of applying for these jobs, and because the negative emotion DEFINITELY goes against the spirit of my feel-good experiment, I stopped what I was doing so I could write this post.

I stopped to think about something that feels good.

Enter my tried and true heroine of all-that-feels-good:  Ducky.

This morning, the wind was blowing about 20 m.p.h. on the beach.  It was cold and foggy, and the tide was coming in.  Ducky had a blast chasing sandpipers, seagulls, and crows.  She also went after whatever was blowing across the sand.

Today’s offerings included bits of seaweed, pieces of crab shell, and chunks of Styrofoam (from floats).  All were equally fascinating to Miss Ducky.

Watching her chase that stuff is a riot.  She races after it and pounces on it.  Most of the time, the wind whisks away her prize before she can claim it.  She sees it continuing on its mad journey down the beach and she races after it again.  Run.  Pounce.  Wag tail.  Run.  Pounce.  Wag tail.  From time to time, she captures what she wants.  She usually eats it (no matter what it is), then wags her tail and starts the process again.

Ducky is my feel-good guru.  Not only does she make me smile, she shows me the process of going after what I want.

Following Ducky’s method is a good idea:  You go after it (align with it), feeling good along the way.  If it gets away, you go after it some more, still feeling good.  When you get it, you feel good.  When you’re trying to get it, you feel good.  It’s all about feeling good.

Ducky isn’t as interested in the capture as she is the chase.

That’s the secret of feeling good.  If we can feel good along the way to what we want, more of what we want will come.

I know this.  So feeling bad about these jobs isn’t an option.

I have to see it as a game or a challenge or not do it at all.

What I really want (the lottery, the book sales, the freedom to do what I want) is coming—BUT it will only come if I line up with it.  Feeling lousy while applying for writing jobs is not helping me.

So I choose to feel better.  And I do.

Thanks, Ducky.  You did it again.