Manifesting 101: Irony and Angels

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To say it’s been an interesting morning is an understatement.  

It all started last night.

The Irony

Aaron and I were winding the week down and chatting in the living room.  I told him how the Pilates and Hollow Holds were definitely making a difference strengthening my core muscles and how all the walking I’ve done the past 2 years has improved my balance and coordination.

Important after falling off a diving board and having a brain bleed at 10 left me paralyzed on the left side and balance challenged.

We decided to do pizza for dinner.  As he was coming in from the garage a half hour later I got up and ran to the kitchen to meet him and the pizza.

And slipped on the kitchen floor.  Yeah real coordinated.

I reflexively put out my left hand – behind me – taking the brunt of the fall on my left forearm.  Because it didn’t hurt too badly I decided to sleep on it and see how it was in the morning.  It wasn’t worse in terms of pain but it was pretty swollen so I decided to have it checked out.

Rats

My left forearm is broken.

More Irony and then Angels

Before they let me go the doctor asked me to remove my wedding and engagent rings when I got home. 

She worried if there was swelling it might interfere with circulation to my fingers.

I explained that might be a problem.  I’ve recently begun taking creatine so a bit of fluid retention.  I told her I would try a bit of soap to try to slide them off.  She was very concerned and asked that if that didn’t work I go to the fire department because they have tricks for getting rings off swollen fingers.  Promising I would I went to the pharmacy I normally go to to have a prescription filled.

They were closed and there was no sign displaying when they would be open.

There are 3 pharmacies within close distance so I went to a different one.

They weren’t going to be open til 10am which was 20 minutes later.

Angels

I decided to treat myself to Starbucks.  I’d just taken a bite of a croissant when a group walked in.  I looked up to see from their shirts they were firemen!

Even with all the synchronicities I’ve experiened throughout my life I was amazed.

Thank you universe!

I approached one of them and explained the situation, asked if he could help me out.  He smiled said he wanted to talk to his partner and asked if I’d heard of the dental floss trick for getting a ring off swollen fingers.

Nope.

They checked their gear – no floss.

They also tried a lubricant – no dice.

I went to the 3rd pharmacy to get dental floss while they waited at the seating area outside Starbucks.

A Rite-Aid.

Having recently declared bankruptcy the shelves were bare.  No dental floss.

Back to the original store which is a grocery with a pharmacy inside.

Comedy of Errors

I ended up in line behind two people with completely full shopping carts, with one of the two buying several pumpkins and gourds, all of which had to be weighed.  Me?  Only the dental floss.

I’m no good with self checkout.  It truly is comical.

Picturing the firemen waiting while I’m gone longer than a walk across the parking lot should have taken wasn’t as stress free as it might have been.

As a good friend points out from time to time Pat (patience) and I don’t necessarily get on well.

They were great – amazed the pharmacy across the parking lot didn’t have floss – and set to work getting the rings off.

During which I related the series of events that led to us being in the right place at the right time.

Success!

After a morning of adventure I’m home typing this story.  Still amazed I’m also grateful the nuns forced me to be right-handed when I was born  a southpaw.

Have an awesome day!

Be well

Manifesting 101: Details Shmetails

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I’ve recently been working on a writing project increasing in complexity as I make progress.

Not great.

Even with encouragement from the Universe – in the form of articles validating scientific principles woven into the fictional storyline – the project itself has started tying me up in knots.  

The Cursed Hows

To put in context I need to go back to 2013.

To Arizona.

We were at a crossroads.

Renting month to month while deciding whether to go east or west.

I was fortunate to discover the work of Mike Dooley who introduced me to the concept of the cursed hows.

Long story short he framed the idea that while it’s natural for some if not most of us to be planners when it comes to manifesting goals we have an opportunity to seriously reduce stress if we don’t worry about how it’s going to happen.

No need to know the details – just trust that it will.

Letting Go

Which circles back to faith and confidence in manifesting – a challenge I’ve had.

I’m a planner.  I needed to know how it would happen so I could anticipate issues – cut them off at the pass.  

Um – ha ha.

After reading Mike’s take I was able to let go of the need to know which built confidence somehow it would happen – and I didn’t need to worry about the details

The cursed hows

Confidence

This led to faith that the same energy that worked numerous miracles in my life wasn’t going to screw up when it came to my goals.

Including not granting them when it was in my best interest.

I didn’t have a problem with the idea I deserved to achieve my goals – I just needed to know how it would happen.

Circling Back

To my current project.

For days I worried over how I was going to find the wherewithal to tackle a project that was a means to an ends.

It was energy intensive at a time I was coming out of severe burnout.  I didn’t want to slide backward.

After waking stressed 3 days in a row I told myself not to worry about it.

Note: I had confidence in the project. 

It’s a project of the soul. That wasn’t the issue…

I assured myself – at 5:35am – “You’ll figure it out.”

That confidence came from reminding myself I’d published over 20 books, had been interviewed for my EMF Sensitivity work, and was comfortable in my skin as a writer.

It was while on a walk later that morning – still wondering how am I ever going to pull this off? – that rather than reminding myself I had what it takes I reminded myself I didn’t need to worry about the cursed hows. 

I told myself to keep on the path of what I was doing and any next steps that needed to happen would present themselves at the appropriate time.

An Odd Thing

For me.

Maybe it was deciding to live a philosophy understood on paper but suddenly I was lighter of heart.

Confident somehow it would all work out.

What I did know was that I now had the energy to take the next step confident whatever I needed to do next would just be there.

Somehow.

I didn’t need to worry about it.

The Universe would guide me.

Feeling better I finished my walk and got back to work.

The Universe Confirms

Plugging into my morning routine I was half-astounded half-amused to find a thumbs up from the Universe had come into my sphere of awareness.

Timing – like Perspective – is Everything.

Unlike the other messages this one spoke to the philosophical methodology I was just coming to embrace.

A methodology that had been an Achilles heel for decades.

Not a coincidence.

Sign Post or Post Note?

The experience allowed me to further release attachment to the process

Strengthened the idea it would all work out 

And wouldn’t you know solutions to various concerns began to appear

As if by magic

Manifesting 101: To See or to Write

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Vision Board V Ideal Scene

Thought I’d do a follow-up to my post about the success I’ve had writing goals down – in one form or another – to increase the likelihood of achieving them.

I pointed out that if we aren’t meant to have something no amount of writing is going to change that.

In the post I mention working with Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization Workbook to focus on two goals

  • Romantic relationship
  • Writing career

I used the Ideal Scene exercise to write out a day in an imagined future when this person was already in my life.

Writing it as if I was writing a letter to a friend telling them all about this romantic partner.

I had incredible success.

It was as if I’d projected myself into the future and wrote a day in the life he was a part of.

I used the page where you do a form of Vision Boarding to put images – either drawn or cut from magazines – for my career goal.

Using images from magazines I focused this exercise on my goal of being a successful writer.

While I know the Ideal Scene was a resounding success I had to put the Vision Boarding effort through a couple of filters before seeing that it, too, was a resounding success.

It just happened differently than I was expecting.

In short.

Though I’d long said I wanted to be a successful novelist – and I had been writing fiction stories for years – after completing the exercises in the workbook I set the workbook aside then turned my efforts to more immediate concerns which included the job I had.  

I was not being paid to write.

Passionate about success in whatever I do, I put tremendous effort into succeeding.

At the job I was being paid for – an aspiring technical consultant.

I went on to become a very successful senior technical consultant with expertise in network interoperability and global supply chain management.

And the writing?

Here’s the interesting thing.  I spent part of the time at the first Fortune 500 tech company I worked at as a tech writer.  Not only did I write content for proposals and other technical publications, I created the graphics for those publications.  All of this set me up for success as an independent writer.

Though I had no idea at the time.

But Wait!  There’s More!

The Vision Boarding worked too!

I recently took stock of my my writing career and realized I’d achieved everything I set out to decades ago.  It just didn’t happen how I thought.

I never would have guessed that Smashwords would come along though once it did I knew the writing industry would never recover from the fallout tsunami.

While attending an RWA conference in Anaheim years after Smashwords and Amazon upended the industry I looked around to see I was ahead of the curve on the direction things were headed because my business acumen – along with an ability to see the way the wind was blowing -had set me up for success in the new publishing landscape.

Both skills were honed while working in the tech industry with its rapid and constant change.

And that Vision Board?

I achieved everything I pasted into that workbook.  Just not how I thought it would come about.

Perhaps the highest irony is that while I thought I would be traveling for writing – I put imagery that showed travel along with writing on that page in the workbook- it was the other way around.  I was traveling for business and took the opportunity to work on my craft when time allowed.

Which when something matters you find.

In Conclusion

I achieved every career goal I set out to but the biggest takeaway is that the Universe was in charge of how that happened.

And when.

As for the Ideal Scene and Vision Boarding, I would definitely recommend either or both methods as tools to help achieve goals.  Just be prepared it may take longer than you expect and will lead you along paths you might not otherwise have noticed.

Or planned on taking.

Be well!

Note: I met my husband through work so my focus on becoming a successful technical consultant – doing what I could with what I had at the time – paid off.

It helped me achieve multiple goals.

Manifesting 101: A Familiar Feeling

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I’ve mentioned how like so many of us the pandemic left me with severe burnout.

Career burnout.

As with many other variables that surround us now the truth is the pandemic accelerated something already in motion.  

Unless something changed my trajectory I would have hit a wall at some point.

As part of my recovery – and irrespective of the governor’s pandemic coping recommendations – I incorporated walking into my recovery plan.  

2 – 6 miles/day.

This wasn’t a burden as I’ve been an avid walker for decades.

Walked 26 miles less than a year after being paralyzed by a brain hemorrhage to raise money for March of Dimes.

As the weeks turned to months and the miles piled up I noticed something peculiar.  I felt certain felings at the same locations along the route.  What made it peculiar is that the feelings were associated with places I’d lived throughout the years; places that in some cases couldn’t be more different than where I am now.

Not just in terms of climate.

Tuning into the feelings allowed me to see that each evoked a memory of what I loved about the place associated with the feeling.

Wouldn’t It Be Cool?

I’ve written previously that along the path of my life I’ve uttered those words only to find that I manifested what came next in that phrase.  This is especially true when it comes to where I live.  What I came to see over months of introspection while walking is that where I live is actually a mix of several locations tied together by that phrase.

Wouldn’t it be cool…?

To illustrate I’ll describe the essence of what I liked at a handful of the locations.

Grandmother’s House.

No wolf included.

My paternal grandparents lived in an affluent neighborhood near Lake St. Clair.  I loved spending the night at their house not just to see the lake and all the mansions in the area but because it was quiet.

We lived on a busy road.

Many a night as I lay in bed and allowed the silence to wrap around me like a warm blanket I thought “Wouldn’t it be cool to live in a place that was this quiet at night so you could sleep in peace?”

It’s a scenario I’ve had off and on depending where I was living.  

Dorms aren’t the quietest places, nor is living across from a US Mail processing center.

Warm breezes.

With palm trees that bend at 45 degree angles during a hurricane – oh my!

There is an area not far along the path I walk that always evokes the feeling of when I lived in Florida. 

Regardless of the temperature or whether it’s pouring rain – even snow.

The feeling disspiates a short distance later, limiting it to a very specific area.

The area has nothing in common from what I can tell with where I lived in Florida.

Shelter From the Storm

Living with a British family.

My parents split when I was 13 and for a time my mom brother and I were homeless.  Though we eventually got a place to rent we spent time living in my maternal grandmother’s basement and before that, living with the family of the British surgeon who took out my tonsils years earlier.

The man who began my tutelage in holistic medicine after seeing my passion for it while we lived with his family.

I like to think he’d be proud of me for following up with formalized education.

When I walked to school alongside his kids I would look at the nice homes and think Wouldn’t it be cool to live in a place like this?  I don’t know what it is about that specific area along the path I walk but every time I walk by it I am brought back to those days walking to school.

What’s odd is those days spent walking were in the dead of a Michigan winter.

January February and part of March.

I get these feelings each time I walk by, regardless of the season, or temperature.

Even in 80 degree heat!

Eureka!

The role of feelings in manifesting.

This morning it occured to me that what I’d manifested wasn’t an image so much as a feeling.  Each of the locations I thought Wouldn’t it be cool…? were places I felt happy.

Places of refuge in otherwise chaotic times.

Places of peace and security.

The Outlier.

Florida.

Florida was a mixed bag.

It was while living here my parents decided to split up.

In the years since I’ve periodically thought  it would be cool to live in Florida again but the circumstances never matched.  I got the next best thing, however…Southern California!

It was weather and palm trees I missed most!

In the past year I read a number of books on manifesting that cover the importance of feelings in manifesting and while I understood intellectually I had trouble forcing feelings I didn’t feel.

A number of the books offer suggestions on how to evoke a feeling but I was unable to get any of them to consistently work for me.

It was while tuning into this new awareness while walking this morning – that each of those Wouldn’t it be cool…? locations was a place of security and peace – that I came to see something else.  Those are feelings that are part of who I am by nature.

Nature Vs. Nurture.

Painful Memories.

I’ve been in situations where I was forced into survival mode.

Situations where I was living or working.

What’s interesting to note is that until I was out of college I had no control over my living conditions.  As for working – before landing in a toxic corporate soup I’d always had good jobs.

Doing work I enjoyed in good environments with people I liked.

In hindsight I came to see that in order to survive that horrendous toxic soup I was in I had to go on the defensive and look out for myself, which goes totally against my nature.

I’d known from the time I was a child I wanted to be a doctor, not exactly a selfish calling.

Being in such an environment – toxic – makes it that much more difficult to dredge up feelings long enough to manifest something positive.  

Like escape.

Difficult but not impossible.

This is where memories of better times can really help and if you need a bit of bolstering to hold onto that memory you can add the following to keep the happiness going

  • music 
  • movies 
  • friends 

Music is strongly tied to memories so I made sure what I listened to in difficult times brought comfort and joy.

Whenever I longed for Southern California I would plop in Tequila Sunrise.

Or the soundtrack.

Spending time walking with friends at Kensington Metropark after a long day in toxic soup was a balm for the soul.

Both for time spent with friends and time spent in nature.

Though I find it curious that there’s such a patchwork of different energies in one place I’m gratified to know they are tied together by a wonderful bit of truth.  Each is a manifestation of positive happy energy.  

My energy.

I encourage people to find ways to keep positive feelings front and center as often as possible.

Regardless of what life is dealing them.

Walking can definitely be a part of that effort.

Be well!

Manifesting 101: So, You Want a Shortcut

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I haven’t fallen over a cliff, I’ve been focusing on that much needed self-care and while I have a blog post in draft, I do have a meaningful anecdote to share.

The Universe and a human were walking side by side, the human  deciding whether or not to trust the message they were getting about next steps.

This person has been dealing with a few challenges but did ask for guidance.

Omipotent and therefore able to pick up on the concern, the Universe says, “I’m leading you by the hand down the path and it isn’t a path of thorns.”

The human is considering the words thoughtfully when the Universe continues

“Of course, I can’t be held responsible if you decide to take a path you think is a shortcut only to find it’s a path lined with thorny shrubs.”

Reminds me of a time when Aaron and I were hiking in Sedona and I indicated what looked to be a shortcut.  Aaron subsequently spent close to a half hour carefully picking cactus needles from  my hair, shoulder blade, back, and waist.

Thank God for blue jeans!

Post in draft coming soon.

Be well!