Category Archives: Abundance

Why Law Of Attraction Is So Yesterday

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Ever since the movie ‘The Secret’ came out in 2006, a whole new sector in the global self-help industry has blossomed.  Suddenly, people were finding the message that we can create our own reality an empowering alternative to what they had put up with previously: being stuck, sick, poor and unhappy.  Six years later, after countless of books, audios, videos, programmes and systems being produced to cater to a mass of people hungry for more info, more details, more secrets to master this ‘secret’ – I see two things in terms of where this has taken us in our conscious development.

On one hand, we have seen people deepening into the awareness that there’s more than just visualising getting the money, job, relationship, house, car, vacation.  We’re seeing people moving on from what started as quite a shallow level of approaching the concept of our spiritual powers, to understanding that we cannot force our external reality to change without doing the work to change our internal selves.

For example, by adding the dimension of our emotional states to check where we are internally and doing the work to bring our vibration closer to that which we want to manifest.  By working on the blocks that get in the way of us feeling a certain way internally, we have to examine our stories of injustice, hurt, betrayal and abandonment and heal those issues inside us in order to be able to change our internal state – and then as our external state morphs to mirror it, we’re said to have succeeded in manifesting what we want.

This can be good thing.  As our awareness deepens and we’re able to appreciate beyond face value, our consciousness as a whole can continue to expand further away from the level of struggles in which so many of us are trapped – so that we can finally reclaim our true spiritual powers.

But I also see this whole LOA business as a terrible thing for our growth.  I am all for people wanting to exercise their personal power and take control of how their lives turn out to be.  People are, however, getting it wrong with the law of attraction and unless they wake up to the truth, they will continue to be side-tracked to a false path of empowerment.

I’m going to take a risk and say something bold here.  Practising law of attraction keeps us stunted in our growth.  The way it is generally being practised is limiting.  It keeps us stuck in a limited perception of who we are and the extent of goodness the Universe is capable of showing us.  It prevents us from fully expressing ourselves as the true, magnificent beings we are.

The reason for this is, in the practice of LOA there’s usually an over-emphasis on manifesting a specific outcome.  People are taught to put all their energy into making one specific thing come true.  The problem with this is, the idea of this specific thing which we believe we want, is usually borne out of our limited, egoic selves.  What I mean by that is it comes from a part of us that doesn’t know any better.

This desire which we have – and which drives us to go in search of techniques and tools to manifest it into form – is not a higher desire, or a spiritually inspired desire.  The reason I say this is, a higher, spiritually-inspired desire would not put us in a state of desperation, neediness and obsessiveness – like the one that drives us to go looking for more secrets to ‘The Secret’.  We would be relaxed about it, since we’d have a sense of knowingness that it will come to manifest, and we’re not obsessed about ensuring that it will manifest.  We would recognise it as a divine calling and know that we will be supported to have it.  Actually “to have it” is not quite accurate, because it denotes the same “I must possesss it” energy behind most LOA practices; rather, it’s more accurate to say that “we will be bestowed this thing at the right time”.

LOA is usually practised in such a way that it’s a dynamic of opposing energies.  It’s like we’re trying to force something into being.  We’re taught to summon our will to make it happen, to max-up the intensity of our desire, to keep seeing in our minds the thing we want with all the details of exactly how we want it.  I don’t know how some people can claim to enjoy practising the law of attraction!  Sounds like such hard work and so much of working against what feels natural.

Don’t get me wrong.  I practise manifestation from time to time since I’m very human and have my own fears and desperations.  I’ve even ‘perfected’ my own manifestation ritual incorporating breathwork, movements, energetic alchemy and ceremony, which works very powerfully.  I am merely pointing out the gap that’s found in what seems to be excessive and off-track in the way we’re practising it.

The thing that bothers me most about the LOA practice is how we’re encouraged to want something so badly that we’re not willing to accept not having it.  This is one of the supposed ‘secrets’.  Sure, we’re also taught to add in the phrase “or something better” after stating what we want.  But people don’t mean it!  Their focus is still on the desire; the “something better” is a token addition just in case something goes wrong with your manifestation so you’d better spread your net a little bit wider.  It is still borne out of fear of not getting that thing you want.

Sure, we’re taught to practise “letting go” of the desire to want it after we’ve performed the manifestation ritual.  Again, this almost counters the intense desiring, intending, forcing that happens when we’re “putting it out there”.  Why pretend to let go when in truth we’re obsessed about getting it?  The two opposing steps do not make sense to me.

At this point (if you’re still with me) you may be reacting with the thought, “But I only want this thing!”  I understand that you do not and cannot know anything else that might make you feel more fulfilled and happier.  This is what you’ve got right now and you only have this to go with.  Right?  Not really.  I invite you to consider the possibility that if you can move past this stage of only accepting having this thing which you want, you stand a chance of liberating yourself from what is yet another disempowering paradigm and really stake your claim on your true powers.

A Much More Empowering Paradigm – The True Path to Freedom, Abundance, Joy

The way that most people practice LOA limits their true potential for joy and happiness.  Even if we’re tapping into our spiritual powers to create something into reality, it is still a shallow level of exercising our powers.  We are capable of far more than that, and we deserve to stop limiting ourselves to only such limited options and dive into real joy and happiness.

We are aiming for more of this-and-that when we should be just letting go of it all and dropping into what we already are – which far surpasses what we can gain from manifesting this thing we think we want.  Our true purpose or destination should be to enter into what I call the Realm of Miracles, where true beauty, joy and abundance is found.

The place where we truly want to go, but which we normally don’t realise, is to return to and to live in Wonderment.  I truly believe that this is our final destination.  Bearing witness to the contrast of how things were and how things turn out to be – which fills us with a sense of ecstatic joy, inspired awe, complete marvel at the sheer ingenuity of how a certain situation has turned out to be, or the deeply-moving beauty of a sight before you.  To be surprised, to see now what we didn’t see before, to be presented with a creative solution we never could imagine before.  To feel joyful and happy for no apparent reason, just from being alive, freed from all agendas to gain something or other…. This is the joy we’re really meant to experience on a daily basis.

To get there, we need to transform our default template from one of negativity, harshness, scarcity, sadness, depression to one of joy, beauty, abundance, inspiration.  Where every day of your life – whether you get the things your mind thinks it wants or you don’t – you are fully awake at every moment and able to sense the life in everything around you.  This is the work we ought to be focusing on, not the limited work of aiming to manifest one specific thing outside of us.

You might at this point say, “Well, if you had to go through the financial stresses I have, you wouldn’t be sitting on your high horse and telling me to aim higher for the Realm of Miracles.  Right now, the only miracle I need is some hard cash to pay my bills!”  That is, of course, understandable; our fears make our perception so narrow that we can’t see outside of the problem and it’s natural that we respond in fear/limitation.

But let me tell you.  When I didn’t get the money I was fervently trying to manifest, I’d experienced more joy and happiness.  Not from having a lack of money, but I found a source of joy and happiness somewhere other than money.  This was a real gift to me.  That door to more joy and happiness than I could ever imagine, regardless of whether I have or don’t have money, was closed until I found it and opened it.  I was able to find it by looking somewhere apart from where my mind told me to look.  I don’t mean looking towards something dysfunctional to distract myself.  I actually looked into a place inside of me – the last place one would think to look.  Had I manifested the money, I would’ve gone on with my life without having any reason to look in this place.

I’ve had many such experiences.  When my relationship didn’t happen the way I wanted it to, I learned to connect deeply with myself and healed my deep insecurity.  When a job I wanted didn’t materialise, I reconnected to my original passion when I started doing this type of work and discovered how beautiful my powers are.  So don’t judge yourself as having failed if your LOA ‘fails’ – you have not failed in your spiritual growth.  If I had gotten the money I wanted, the relationship I wanted, and the job I wanted, I might not have had the chance to experience all these unexpected and highly-creative outcomes.

How many times have we heard somebody saying they wouldn’t trade their difficult experience for anything because of what they now know.  They might be talking about having gone through a huge financial crisis that saw their whole world crumble overnight, a terminal disease, five years of imprisonment, a painful breakup…. things the mind could not have fathomed any other way of resolving except to manifest that specific thing directly related to the situation.  Yet they may report afterwards about some great unexpected gain which totally took them by surprise and healed them into more wholeness than ever.

The bonus is that when this happens, your reality will change anyway.  That thing which you want, will come at the right time and maybe not in the way you wanted.  From this viewpoint, I’d say that effortless LOA works, because you’ll always get what you deeply want.  But you may not get what your egoic self wants if it’s not aligned with your deeper desires.  Trying to do techniques to try to make it come true isn’t going to work and if it does it’s not a lot of fun.

Practising ‘deliberate creation’ (another LOA term), the way it is usually being practised, keeps us stuck on a limited perspective of who we are because it reinforces our sense of lack.  I believe the real work we need to do right now, as a collective, is in healing our inner insecurity – to fill up the emptiness, void, lack-of inside us with our spiritual essence so that we’re strongly connected to the divine, and it triggers memory of who we really are and how powerful we are.

Why We Stay In Abusive Situations

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When working with clients, I see a common theme that crops up all the time, no matter what life issues they are struggling with at the time.  It is the feeling of being trapped, unable to find a way out of a situation.  Whether it is in a relationship, a job situation, or their home life, there is a huge emotional need to create change but also a daunting prospect of what taking steps towards change could entail.  These problems manifest as stresses, confusions, frustrations, worries and conflicts.  The word ‘stuck’ is very apt in these situations, as they struggle internally with wanting things to be different and yet are crippled by thoughts of negative consequences of change.

You may know of a friend or family member who complains about being in an emotionally abusive relationship.  Or a former colleague who still hates his job but can’t seem to find the resources to leave the job.  Or someone who continues to invest in the same business after repeatedly running into disappointments.  Perhaps they are hoping that things will be different this time, while continuing to stay in the same behaviours, or that things will improve on their own.  I call these and similar types of situation ‘abusive situations’ because you are in a position of being abused by others or by yourself (self-abusive).

If you find yourself stuck in an emotionally unhealthy situation, it may be time to honestly examine your motivations and begin breaking apart the energy of stuckness.  This will begin freeing you to move in a more fulfilling direction.  The first step is to commit to looking at your situation with total honesty.  That means owning up to the pain being in this situation is causing you.  What are you sacrificing or not honouring in yourself by being in this situation?

It also means acknowledging that it’s a choice you have made to stay in this situation.  Granted, it may seem that staying is the only option, at least for now.  That may or may not be true.  But the power comes from acknowledging the truth of why you are staying in this situation.  We tend to make excuses to justify a choice or behaviour – in short, we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better.  By looking at the real reasons you are still in this situation, you take your power back.  Honesty gives you power, even if the thought of being honest makes you feel weak at the moment.

Start by listing the external factors (e.g. money,  social obligation, a promise made to someone).  Then list the emotional factors (i.e. what are your fears?).  You’re likely to find that listing the emotional factors is more challenging than listing the practical reasons.  In fact, practical reasons are often used to cover up deeper, emotional motivations.  So let’s explore some of these motivations together.

Fear Of Being Judged

Perhaps you’re afraid that others might judge you for having made a mistake.  Again.  If you have an emotional history of having failed before, you may refrain from coming clean with others that things aren’t going all that well for you in the same department.  What transpires then is a painful need to hide what is really going on for you.  In time, you may even be driven to isolate yourself.

The thought of telling someone is too embarassing.  Or maybe you’re afraid that people might worry about you (after all, you’ve worked hard to change your life around after the last ‘failure’).  Were there sceptics around when you had first gone into this situation?  People whom you imagine are dying to find a chance to say to each other, “Well, that’s hardly surprising, is it?”

As real as it may seem, all these things are taking place in your imagination.  The mind has a tendency to blow things out of proportion.  We tend to believe that we are judged by more people and more harshly than in reality.  Accept that some people will judge you, but also acknowledge that some people will be supportive of you.  How we tend to focus entirely on one aspect and magnify it until it is the only thing we see in our reality!  Seek out those who support you rather than those who run you down just because you are about to take a courageous leap.

I’ve found that too few people can admit to having made a mistake.  There is nothing wrong with saying, “Looks like I made a mistake.”  It is honest, simple and humble.  Very few people would be able to pass negative judgements on that for long.

Punishing Yourself

How much of you staying in an abusive situation a way for you to punish yourself?  Perhaps you are harbouring feelings of guilt from your past, and you are now motivated by a need to allay your guilt by putting yourself through pain.  If this rings true for you, look at where this guilt is really coming from.  The true source of this guilt is seldom from a person involved in the current situation; rather, it’s likely to be displaced guilt projected onto the current situation, so that you feel compelled to ‘make up’ for whatever pain you perceive you are causing the person involved now.  A kind of displaced or misplaced loyalty.

In self-destructive acts, this person you are punishing yourself for might be you.  You are perpetrating abusive acts on yourself because you are punishing yourself for something you feel guilty about.  If you did or are doing something that conflicts with your ethical principles, you may take it upon yourself to correct that imbalance by punishing yourself.

Give yourself permission to forgive yourself by reflecting on the lessons you can learn from your mistakes.  How can you become a better person because of the experience?  By focusing on how more whole you are when you incorporate those lessons into who you are from now on, you can stop the self-beating and change your actions from self-abusing to self-loving.  Consciously choose self-loving acts to reinforce moving towards healing and forgiveness.  Ask yourself, “Is this act or thought self-loving or self-abusive?”

Disempowerment & The Fear Of Responsibility

Making empowered choices can be scary.  We fear stepping into our power because we fear the responsibility that comes from exercising our freedom.  If we allowed other people to make decisions for us, we won’t have to be responsible for making a wrong decision.  There may be a link to some deep-seated guilt from your past (see above), which may have made it feel safer for you to take a back seat in life.  Yet if this conflicts with your desire to be in control of your life, it will cause you to be resentful of who you leave the decisions to, as well as yourself for choosing not to honour your power.

We choose the route of disempowerment because we see getting empowered as hard work, that it’s too far a destination for us to reach.  Truth is, empowerment is our natural state.  It takes more resources to move away from empowerment than it does to move away from disempowerment.  We have to sacrifice our integrity, dishonour ourselves, compromise our values to become disempowered – and we suffer the pain of moving in such an unnatural direction away from our authentic self.  By reversing all those choices – by staying in integrity, honouring our truth, living in line with our values – we immediately return to an empowered state.

Low Self-Worth

Perhaps you suffer from low self-worth and you believe that being in abusive situations is what you deserve.  Even though you profess to want to change things, deep down you don’t believe that you deserve better than the situation you are in right now.  If you don’t work on improving your self-worth, you may forever devalue yourself in an attempt to fit in with your perception of yourself.

Holding yourself in poor light makes you feel unworthy of a better job, career, relationship, home, lifestyle, etc.  You may wonder at times why you still choose to move back to this and similar situations, thus perpetuating a cycle of self-abuse.  Raise the value of yourself in your eyes.  That is the only way out of this cycle.  If you don’t heal your relationship with yourself, you will eventually find yourself in the same situation.  Even if you take conscious actions to move into healthier situations, if the source of your low self-worth is not examined and healed, the results will only be fleeting.

If this seems too big a task for you to go through on your own, seek the help of a therapist.  There are also lots of effective techniques available in the self-help sector.  The technique is less important than your willingness and openness to healing and growing.  It may takes years of healing but every step is a progress in healing.  That journey can be a joyful adventure as you discover more and more beautiful aspects of yourself.

The Allure Of Staying Imprisoned

Sometimes, we choose to stay in helpless situations because we carry unresolved anger from our past.  Staying in abusive situations gives us an excuse to be angry.  It provides us with an outlet to express our sense of injustice.  Our past indignation becomes an unfinished business which allows us to feel justified in voicing that anger about being mistreated.  So we stay trapped by choosing to imprison ourselves, even when we really do have the resources to get out of it.  We focus on why we can’t get out of it, instead of why we can and must.

Sift through what’s right and wrong in this situation: same anger, rightful anger, but wrong context.  Put the anger back to where it belongs and deal with the anger in its appropriate context.  Knowing that you might have been motivated by a need to feel angry by putting yourself in this situation gives you the power to choose something better.

Along with the need to feel angry is the need to show others that you are being mistreated.  You may be waiting for a saviour because your saviour never came to your rescue last time and you still feel the unfairness of it.  By staying helpless, you ‘prove’ to others how wrong it all is – for someone to say, “Yes, this is unfair,” and maybe extend their love and support to you.

The saviour is you.  This time, there will be no saviour outside of you.  That is not to say that you should close the door to people who offer love and support to you.  It simply means that you take it upon yourself to step into your power and own up to your deeper, emotional motivation in this situation.  When you call it for what it is and deal with your emotions in their appropriate contexts, you relate to your world differently – a world where people are kind, compassionate, loving and supportive.

The Illusion Of Scarcity

If you’re buying into the illusion that the world is a place of scarcity – that resources and opportunities are in short supply – you would feel more fearful about getting out of your situation or “rocking the boat” in any way.  Fear of losing what you have, even if it’s shit.

The fear of running out of resources is such an intense emotional investment that it traps a person in awful situations.  It is a crippling fear that renders you stunned, incapacitated as your spirit withers away.  For all the awfulness that you go through by being in that situation, you put up with it because it is better than nothing.

Are you certain that you’ll be left with nothing?  What is nothing?  Money, house, friends?  How depleted is it really?  Is it really down to nothing?  Tell the truth about it.  Some money to last you a month is not nothing.  A less luxurious house is not nothing.  Two supportive friends is not nothing.  What about the things you will gain?  Having more integrity, self-honour, freedom, happiness, joy, peace is not nothing.  Where you lose out, you will gain in other aspects.  This is a given is you’re being true to yourself.

Trusting that the Right Thing Will Be Delivered

If being in this situation is causing you huge conflicts, start exploring whether you can make any changes while preserving the relationship, job, business, etc.  In other words, is it salvageable?  It may be a case of you learning to stand up for yourself and saying no to abusive people.  Do you have a pattern of people-pleasing?  How might you assert yourself and draw your boundaries to protect yourself from being abused?  Even if you invite unpleasant reactions when you say, “No more!” you come out of it with more dignity and self-respect.

If you are trying to preserve what isn’t working anymore, you risk running into great mental turmoils and eventually destroying yourself.  Maybe you have already been racking your brains and found very little hope for improvement within that context.  Walk away from the situation.  At least you get to clear your conscience with yourself.  What about the fear of leaving someone feeling hurt, abandoned, betrayed?  If you can’t stay in the same situation without removing the resentment, then your choice to stay is a continued choice to be resentful to others.  Your self-sacrifice, your voluntary imprisonment in that situation, will continue to generate anger and resentment and renders both of you joyless.

Things rarely improve on their own under these circumstances.  By staying in the situation, you will become stagnant or things will get worse.  When you cut your ties with that situation and break an unhealthy pattern of allowing yourself to be abused, you trust that in time things will move in your favour.  When you do the right thing by you, your direction will be revealed to you.  I have witnessed many times how giving up something brings in something better which we never imagined before.  This is the gift when we open up to trust.

Spiritual Beauty In Vastness

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Someone once asked what inspired spiritual beauty for me.  I replied that it is when I see vastness – i.e. a huge monument, a magnificent mountain, a sweeping horizon, a large body of water, etc.  We ruminated about why seeing something huge would trigger our sense of spiritual identity.  The person suggested that perhaps it reminds us of how small we are and amidst such grandness we are forced to respect the omnipotence of the higher power.  I wasn’t sure if it resonated fully with me and I’ve been thinking about it since then.

In the last five weeks, I have been on a spiritual retreat and have so far seen numerous sights that inspired great spiritual beauty in me.  I now know the mystery behind vastness.  Rather than reminding me of how small I am, it reminds me of how infinite my true being is.  The sense of being limitless and borderless in my store of abundance, my creativity, is inspired when I look in awe at something monumental.  If it’s a place of history, the richness of the complex stories that have evolved within that time brings to mind a certain timelessness, infiniteness and creativity in our capacity as expressive beings.

It is the coldest winter in 50 years.  The whole country is covered in beautiful snow.  When driving along rural roads, the vastness presented by the snow-covered vista fills me with a curious warmth as joy bubbles in my heart.  I think to myself, “I am as vast as the distance this snow stretches.”  My consciousness expands beyond the confines of my physical body.  The glorious sun shines through the cold and I love the feel of it on my face.  I think to myself, “I am the sun – infinitely radiant and abundant.”  In moments of facing bone-chilling cold, rather than reminding me of how helpless I am, I dive into the depth of the cold and recover my sense of being Everything out of nothingness.

This is the kind of spiritual growth I had hoped to achieve on my two-month retreat.  I see spiritual beauty all around me.  Interestingly, I also see lots of people complaining about the cold and the tragedy portrayed by one focusing on limitations.  I rejoice in breaking through the illusion of these limitations.  As I embrace the cold and celebrate the lowest temperatures in half a century, I discover that I am truly abundant.

I was on the phone with someone while my window became a screen playing the most awesome snowfall I had ever seen.  Outside, the snowflakes became bigger and bigger, covering the trees and ground with a fluffy blanket of pure white snow.  I was completely hypnotised and struggled to continue speaking.  Because when spiritual beauty overcomes you, there are no words.  You are immersed in feelings that defy words.

As I write this, I wonder if some people in my position would have thought they were watching a horror movie – as the snowflakes became bigger and bigger, rather than seeing beauty they imagined how much the snow would impede their movements, for instance.  Instead of seeing abundance, they saw limitations.  It reminds me of how easy it is for us to focus on the things that are at the end of a creation and interpret it as a limited creation.  When we shift our focus to the source of that creation, we cannot but see the abundance in where creation springs.  The snow comes from a place that generates an abundance of snow; the neighbourhood where the snow covered is the ‘victim’.  Where does your mind naturally focus?

I saw vastness in that snow movie because I’ve had plenty of practice appreciating vastness and letting feelings of spiritual beauty wash over me.  In the past when I was living with a more limited consciousness, I would have conjured up many fearful scenarios out of something that is really a good thing if I had been able to see it that way.  It takes practice to move away from feeling trapped to feeling free.  A prisoner who’s been released will continue to behave as if she’s still in prison, allowing those around her to persecute her until she mentally steps out of her imagined prison.  If you continue to stay small, your world will look small to you.  If you choose to expand out of your smallness, you can call in the vastness around you to be your trusted ally in freeing you from your illusion of being trapped in a limited world.

How do you call in the vastness around you?  Look around you.  Where is the source of what you see?  Follow back to that source and appreciate the store of abundance.  A picture frame made of wood comes from several pieces of wood which comes from a tree in a forest.  Keep ‘zooming out’ until you see the vastness.  What does it remind you of about your true nature?

What about something you judge as bad, such as an abusive person?  That person is expressing their beliefs and judgements, which are formed by and distilled from their experiences in life, which is a complex saga comprising rich characters with a variety of motivations, which immediately gives you a sense of how varied the store of human behaviours is and allows you to open up to the possibilities of many different experiences you can have among the storehouse of human beings you come across in your life.  This kind of ‘opening up’ of the mind is a key to freeing you from the illusion of being stuck with few or no options.  The gift in vastness is very good medicine for one who feels stuck in limitations.

I am passionate about ‘infecting’ other people with my ability to see spiritual beauty.  Having crossed over, so to speak, I would like to invite all of you to open up to the vastness around you, moving past the limitations you perceive, until you experience true feelings of abundance, joy and freedom.  I promise you, it is all there.

How Good Can You Stand?

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Many of my clients with addiction problems have asked why they often drink or use drugs when things are going well for them.  “I can understand if I’d been feeling bad,” they say, “but why is it that when things are good I’d start using again?”  There are many reasons and I am going to offer my views focusing on the aspects which I find particularly interesting.

Sometimes, we use the excuse of wanting to celebrate to go on a binge and end up abusing ourselves.  This is not what I am addressing; here, the celebratory mood is likely to be forced just because we want an excuse to embark on our self-abusing behaviour.  What I am addressing is when your life genuinely starts to look good and you’re feeling good, and then you choose an unhealthy habit and you end up sabotaging yourself.

A typical description sounds like this:

They’ve stopped using.  They’ve been working out regularly, and their body is fitter and stronger.  People are commenting on how good they look.  They’ve learnt to take time out to relax and meditate.  They feel more balanced emotionally and less prone to anxiety.  They feel inspired and creative, perhaps picking up a project they had abandoned.  Overall, they’re feeling good, probably the best they’ve felt in years.  Their life is ripe with possibilities, all the things they’ve always wanted is within their reach…

Then all of a sudden, a thought comes into their head strong and clear: “I want to have a drink” or “I need to go on a hedonistic weekend.”  With that, they embark on the old road of addiction and find themselves in that awful, familiar place – sabotaging all the good they’ve achieved.  This happens not only for those addicted to substances; people also sabotage themselves this way in relationships and businesses.  What is it that makes feeling good so difficult to bear?

Most of us have been programmed to expect pain.  Therefore, when we find ourselves in the unfamiliar place of feeling good, we tend to sabotage it.  If you’ve been struggling in a painful place for a long time, experiencing abundance would be a new concept for you.  You’re simply not used to the feelings of having abundance.

This is similar to having ‘poverty consciousness’.  You might have read statistics of people who won the lottery only to lose all the money they’ve won within a very short time.  In wealth seminars, one of the things they get you to do is to raise your threshold for wealth – how much you believe you are worth deep down – so that you are driven to achieve more wealth and without sabotaging it.  But what I’m addressing is the feelings itself that come from having good things.  If feeling good is uncomfortable for you, you may need to raise your threshold for feeling good.  To make changes, we need to first know where we’re at – where is your current threshold?  How good can you stand?

If your self-concept does not fit into the concept of someone who experiences good, then you are likely to sabotage your situation so that it fits more into your concept of yourself as someone who is in pain – because no matter how good things have become, deep down it’s not what you’ve been programmed to achieve.

Perhaps you secretly believe that you deserve to be punished, and you’ve been dealing with deep-seated guilt and shame about who you are.  If this rings true for you, perhaps now is the time to take a real hard look at what you believe about yourself and work to change those beliefs.  Changing beliefs isn’t just about uttering positive statements to yourself over and over again – it involves the process of reconciling your relationship with yourself, making peace with yourself through forgiveness of yourself and/or others.

Another reason why we might sabotage ourselves is the fear of being disappointed – i.e. we believe that we won’t be able to sustain the good, so we preempt it being ended for us by ending it for ourselves.  One or even a series of disappointments in the past does not mean that it is the most probable outcome for you now, unless you choose to perpetuate that story.  It is fine to be cautious and learn from past mistakes,  but it is defeatist to expect disappointment all the time.

We do this in our heads long before we act on it – i.e. we note the possibility of a positive outcome but we quickly thrash it down just in case we jinx it.  There’s something almost superstitious about the way we think, as if the chance of us getting something good will be better if we don’t expect it.  Actually the reverse is true: if we don’t hold a sense of expectancy for something good to happen, there won’t be a space for it to happen, because when the good things start to come you’re likely to miss recognising it and continue on a self-defeating path.  Expectancy allows us to expand into the realm of positive outcomes, whereas expectation of disappointment closes off the door to this realm.

We fear the unknown.  The unknown is neither destructive nor expansive, but it stores the potential of both.  That’s why it’s so scary to think of stepping into the unknown.  Yet we must be brave to step into the unknown in order to claim the joyous.  We must allow ourselves to not know what form the positive outcome is going to look like and just expect to be able to experience joyousness that can come in any form.  The form is less important – what we can imagine right now is only limited, but the feelings of good can come from many, many different outcomes.

Every time you catch yourself taking a turn for the worse, through your own chosen behaviours, you mark that line that defines your feeling-good threshold.  In time, you’ll develop a definite sense of that threshold.  Next, you can stretch yourself to stay in the space of feeling good until it becomes more comfortable for you being in that space.  We can get used to anything if we stayed in it long enough – after a while, our tolerance will increase and what used to be uncomfortable will become less so.  With awareness that you’ve reached your threshold and that you are about to sabotage yourself but you’re choosing to stay in the space of feeling good, you can train yourself to stop reacting automatically and thus end up in a far better place for a prolonged period.  Life gets better for you as you learn to enjoy positive experiences.

Focusing On Good Things

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A few months ago during clinical supervision, I brought up some personal issues for discussion with my therapist.  He pointed out that I had been coming from scarcity rather than abundance.  Since then, I’ve been working on focusing more on the gifts in situations that appear to be negative.  Through the process, I discovered how easy it is to let myself slip and get caught up in negativity.

That’s why a consistent practice of nurturing our mental-emotional wellbeing is so vital in managing stress levels and ensuring that we maintain a good presence of mind to deal with the normal stresses of life.  The danger of over-exerting ourselves is that we can convince ourselves we can handle more than we’re capable of.  Excesses in lifestyle such as over-consumption of ‘good food’, substance abuse, over-working, over-sleeping or any self-harming activities can go on for years before we realise the toil it has taken on us.  By then, we’re likely to have set into a very negative mindset, because such excesses tend to sap us of any energy left to nurture ourselves properly.

By then, we’re also more prone to confuse our motivations.  In our attempts to make ourselves feel better, we may seek validation from others and act out our neediness.  The mentality of scarcity has set in.  We may obsess over something someone said or did – trying to extract the last drop of validation to fill a bottomless pit.

It’s a bit like the hungry ghost who gobbles up food that never reaches his stomach, so that no matter how much he takes in it can never satiate his hunger.  The ghost is condemned to forever find food to fill his stomach even though the outcome is predictable.  He is miserable because he is trapped in an eternity of seeking food and knowing that it will never take away the hunger – settling for that brief moment of promise when he’s about to put food into his mouth.  Rather than finding other ways to end his misery, he continues to do what will only prolong his misery.

Finding a way out of this space can be difficult, but once you find the door, it can be a breeze.  One of the ways I’ve found to be helpful is to allow myself to be spiritually-moved.  It requires me to drop deeper into my being, beyond all the muck I’ve accumulated, and find my spirit.  My spirit is the part of me that is undamaged and unchanged by any harshness in life.  Then I allow myself to feel movement from the depth of me as I focus on something positive that someone has expressed, something that’s happened to me, or something I’ve done which has stretched me.  I focus on this until I feel an expansion of my spirit.

Your whole world can change by practising this.  In the analogy of the hungry ghost, I like to think that spiritual expansion will do wonders in evolving him into a higher form of spirit that does not feel hunger!  For us, finding a moment to break through the madness we’ve created can change our perception of what is manageable and what is not.

To further counter negative thinking, you can easily adopt a habit of focusing on what you gain rather than what you’ve lost in every situation that appears to be negative.  Even if it may seem that you have lost something, you can tap into the deeper gift of it.  A lifetime of focusing on the negative is how we’ve come to develop a mentality of scarcity.  As such, you may find it challenging to see abundance when it’s there.  Look closer and deeper.  It is there.  And don’t just see it.  Bring the feeling of abundance into your whole being.  Breathe it into the part of you that is trying to push it away until you’ve fully-accepted it as abundance in your life.  Let the feeling grow to one of joy and vastness.

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