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I am becoming a rabid fan of Oprah Winfrey. Not just her TV show, or even because of it. Sometimes I like the show, sometimes I can’t bear to watch another celebrity bouncing around on her couch. On her TV show, she has to appeal to a broad afternoon American demographic in order to sell her sponsors’ products. So, one day she’ll be in her “Dr. Phil” mode, doing the “tough love” thing [which irritates the @#$% out of me], the next day she’ll be interviewing a gentle soul like Eckhart Tolle, who is to Dr. Phil what a Montblanc fountain pen is to a billy club. The day after that Tom Cruise will be making a bleeping asininity out of himself.

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What I love is her website. There are more freebies on that site than any other I can think of. HOURS of webcasts, uninterrupted by commercials. [There is an annoying pitch at the beginning of each webisode, but that's followed by up to an hour of straight delivery of the goods.] Her site has REAMS of digital article pages written by some of the most interesting folks in the field of personal transformation.

My most recent invite [she sends out almost daily offerings of more freebies once you sign up] was to listen to her interview a poet, novelist, and now dream therapist named Rodger Kamenetz. He’s written a book called The History of Last Night’s Dream. Haven’t read it yet, but it’s on its way from Amazon.

Below I’ve “embedded” a droll little 5 minute preview of material Oprah covers in about 40 minutes on her website. [View the webcast HERE.]

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From that little monolgue you might get the impression this guy’s some kind of space cowboy. Dream on. He just has a sense of humor. Here’s an excerpt from his website Bio:

Rodger Kamenetz is the Erich and Lea Sternberg Honors Professor at Louisiana State University and is also the recipient of the LSU Distinguished Faculty Award for 2008. He has a dual appointment as a Professor in the Department of English and in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He is the founding director of LSU’s highly successful MFA program in Creative Writing, and the founding director of the Jewish Studies Program. He holds a B.A. from Yale College and graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities.

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I wish I had the cojones to take on the transmutation of our standard gregarious greeting reflex:

Instead of “HowAreYa?” I would transcend my habitual social catatonia in order to ask other humans, “WhoAreYa?” I know I would be stealing from Ramana Maharshi and his spiritual kinfolk, but I doubt he’d mind, now that he’s operating from a different astral plane.

Speaking of whom, Ramana’s question is the common element in all of the stories of personal transformation [hereinafter “PT”], whether it’s a fleeting insight or a foundation rattling illumination.

Whether you favor Wayne Dyer, Gangaji, Esther Hicks, Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle or you have an alternative personal favorite, they all - I’m willing to wager on this, including your alt personal favorite - they all tell a story about a re-take of their self-portrait and a radical re-write of their bio.

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Before PT

The old self-portrait would show, in almost every case, a furrowed brow and pursed lips to go along with an anxiety-laced bio. [Not always. Esther Hicks says she was virtually carefree when she first encountered a consciousness beyond her own individual slice of the consciousness pie chart.]

The bio would describe a fairly typical conflicted interface with Time and Space. Ten thousand troubling thoughts a day about money, family, friends, personal and national security, aging, body image, and all the other things that remind us to keep our anti-depressant prescriptions current or at least keep the wine cellar stocked.

“Incidentally, Reggie Fox, who runs the Dalai Lama’s 16-mm projector, said that 16-mm Tarzan films or Marx Brothers films would make a big hit with the Dalai Lama and those around him. They most certainly don’t want to see any pictures where human or animal life is taken; amusement and adventure are the things that they are interested in.”

Out of This World - Lowell Thomas, Jr.,
quoted in the front pages of
Another Roadside Attraction - Tom Robbins

After PT

The new self portrait shows an amused adventurer in a goofball suit. Goofballs have the most fun in Time and Space.

The bio is short: “Holographic part-and-parcel of The Creative Mystery, having an adventure in Time and Space. Learning to focus on the fun and funny parts of T&S, as they come and go, and untying any emotional bindings to the bummer parts, letting them come and go, too, without hooking up.” Or, words to that effect.

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Once you really get that you’re not your body, your age, your dysfunctional relationships, your debt or your income - that you’re really an adventurous outpost on the growing edge of The Creative Mystery and regardless how this particular adventure ends it will just be the beginning of the next one - everything changes. Maybe not all at once in an angel dust whirlwind, but it does change.

You start feeling better, more of the time.

You don’t much care what other people think of your new answer to “HowAreYa?:” “Thanks for asking. I’m really stoked about my new job exploring at the growing edge of The Mystery.”

You don’t much care about what other people think about anything that concerns you. Traffic cops and loan officers may be the exception to this. Maybe.

You re-start your novel or your guitar lessons or your watercolor painting or whatever makes you smile, whether or not there will ever be any money in it. You can be a billionaire in your next life.

Speaking of which, you feel free to hang up when creditors call to make you feel guilty about being three days late with your payment. If you are fastidious about courtesy, you can always say, “Thank you for the thoughtful reminder. Now I have to get back to updating my Netflix Queue. Ciao and have a nice day.” Click.

Speaking of which, you no longer believe the Itinerary you created before this Trip into Time and Space needs to have “Paying My Bills On Time” as the pre-printed #1 reason you’re here. You scratch it out. You’ll get to it when you feel like it, starting with the people you really feel good about paying.

Also: You scratch out “Orderliness” from the #2 spot on the pre-printed part of the Itinerary. If you add it back in at all, it’s down at #29. If you’re a particularly busy or gregarious little critter, you may have to move it down to #89.

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It may take a few lifetimes, including one as a clone of Javier Bardem or Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but you outgrow your acculturation in American Puritanism and cultivate your inner European, where flashing a nipple on TV is de rigeur if you expect your commercials to be watched, and not a threat to national security.

Or, you do whatever you jolly well please. It’s your frickin’ adventure. You might as well feel good about it.

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….. At some point on the second or third day, a guard came by to deliver us a change of clothes. We had to wear those orange pajama-type outfits, not our own street clothes. If I recall correctly, first we had to strip totally naked and hand in our old clothes. Then we received the new ones. They’re pretty strict about such things.

As my cellmate and I opened our fresh bundles of clothes and began getting dressed, he started laughing uproariously. I turned toward him to see what could possibly be so funny. He shot me a huge grin and held up one of the clean socks he was given. The sock was only about an inch long. It wasn’t a shrunken sock — it was just the first inch of a regular sock, only enough to cover the toes. This may be one of those “you had to be there moments,” but we looked at each other and busted up laughing. What was he supposed to do with a one-inch sock?

Even though being in jail can be a depressing experience, that small bit of silliness raised our energy tremendously. For at least the next hour, it helped us feel more lighthearted and not take the situation so seriously. Being in jail only enhanced the laughter because we had more tension to release.

Sometimes when I’m hit by a number of setbacks in a row, I get knocked down to a lower energy level. For me the most common negative states are frustration and overwhelm.

When I notice I’m getting sucked down, I’ll sometimes ask myself, “Where’s the sock?” …..

This is only the preface to a terrific post by Steve Pavlina, the grandmaster of bloggers. READ THE ENTIRE POST:
–> HERE.

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What follows was really meant to be part of the “I’m In Denial” post, but that would have made it even more unconcionably long, so I decided to break the material into two parts. If you haven’t read the prior post, I suggest you do so, if you intend to read this one. It will make things clearer.

The main contention of both these posts is that it’s just good sense to ignore what makes you feel like chopped liver and focus, instead, on what makes you feel like champagne.

I contend that it makes sense because I believe that in order to be or do good you have to feel good. Without “good energy,” there will be ice skating in hell before you’re likely to transform yourself or your circumstances.

Whatever you’re focused on tends to expand, not go away. Focus on problems and it’s more likely they’ll get bigger, or seem bigger, and you’ll just feel worse - not solve them. Focus on what brings a sense of wellbeing, even joy, and you’re more likely to stir up energy that will dissolve problems when it’s necessary to re-visit them.

If other folks tell you that the “ignore the problems, focus on feeling good” approach is a form of denial, don’t bother denying it. Just tell them what I do:

“Couldn’t agree more. I am denying that these problems have any power over me. I deny them the right to determine how I feel. I reserve that right. I call that ‘creative denial.’”

I thought the whole “control panel” metaphor in the previous post was pretty damn clever. But, I have an uncanny ability to take something usefully simple and create ornate “practices” for myself that I stop using after a day or two, because it takes too damn much energy to use them to create energy. So, here’s a feel good “practice” that I find much easier to remember and use:

Lots of people have used the metaphor of “Flow” to describe the experience of feeling good, even transcendent, while you’re absorbed in doing something. Electricity flows. Traffic needs to flow. Rivers flow. Blood and neurotransmitters flow. Or else.

So, imagine you’re always in some kind of experiential river-like “life-flow.” Imagine that the “power” of this flow, the impetus behind the speed and direction of this flow, is how you feel. If that’s a step too far for you, at least grant that how you feel may be a gauge of your life-flow. Maybe we could call it “life-force.”

Negative feeling: slow or no flow. Perhaps even counter-flow or cross-flow. Positive feeling: Flow in the right direction.

Of course, every river is going to have a variety of currents making up the overall flow. We won’t try to extend this metaphor to include all the reasons for different currents. You can do that on your own time.

The practice I’m recommending is simple: In the flow of your experience, there will be good feeling currents and lousy feeling currents. Positive “life-force” or negative “life-force.” The best way for you to “Be In the Flow” in a way that feels mostly good is to put yourself in currents that feel good.

If you find yourself turned around and headed upstream, or you’re headed for a rock, or you’re becalmed and stagnant, or you’re about to run aground: feel for a current that feels good. They’re the ones that will take you around the rock and keep you headed downstream.

Somewhere in the flow of your life there are currents that feel good when you’re in them. For me, writing is one of them. Reading books and watching movies that are artful, funny, and inspiring are strong good currents for me. Same with certain kinds of music. You know what your best currents are.

Have you seen that Southwest Airlines series of funny commercials where people get into embarrasing social situations and “want to get away?” The ones that end with the tagline, “You are now free to move about the country?”

You are now free to move about in those currents that feel good.

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Imagine that you “operate” your waking life using a mental control panel. If you closed your eyes, you could see something like the “desktop” on your computer, with rows of little “windows” from which you mentally select. When you select one, it “opens” and you’re looking at a scene representing some element of your Life.

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Then imagine that each of these windows is connected to an “interface” with the neuro-transmitters or whatever the heck those things are that determine how you feel about Life. [What my favorite teacher, Esther Hicks, calls your “Emotional Set Point.”]

Assume the result of this setup is that whatever window you are focusing on will be the major input into how you are feeling in that moment. Assume further that how you are feeling in the moment is the primary determinant of how you will be and how you will act in that moment.

If you are feeling good - elated or confident or encouraged or just enjoying a sense of wellbeing - you will be more likely to act in the best interests of yourself and your fellow humans. If you are feeling lousy - bored, worried, depressed, hostile - you will be more likely to act in ways you’ll wish you hadn’t acted once you start feeling good again.

[Oprah didn't invent the idea that we prefer to feel good and function better when we do. If you think this is a goofball model, you probably also thought buying stock in the makers of Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, et al, was a goofball idea. Not to mention the makers of vodka, gin, bourbon, and cigarettes. The thing is, we need to look beyond pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and nicotine. Even the hard-headed cognitive therapists understand that what we focus on makes a big difference in how we feel, and how we feel makes a big difference in how we behave.]

Here’s my major thesis:

What we tend to do is look mostly at the windows on our mental control panel that are showing flash videos of problems. Past problems, current problems, possible future problems. Problems, problems, problems. We think that by looking at them, even focusing on them intently, we’ll be able to figure out how to fix them. Unfortunately, if we use my model, what we do mostly when we look at them is begin to feel like @#$%. So, the likely result of looking at them will be that we’re less likely to do something positive and more likely to just feel and act worse, or fail to act at all, because we’re just feeling too @#$%-ty.

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We take the windows showing pleasant things for granted, or assume they don’t need any attention. We focus on the problems, imagining that our best use of time is to try to fix them. Unfortunately, the way the control panel works is that focusing on the “window” just keeps that window open, in full screen mode, as the active window. So, we just feel worse and worse and our life starts to feel like a problem.

What we should be doing is ignoring, as much as possible, the control panel windows featuring problems. Instead, we should be opening up and focusing on the windows that are showing flash videos of what makes us feel good.

This - at least in my model - increases the Feel Good Energy Input and makes it more likely that we’ll be and do things that will make us - and those around us - feel good or at least better.

I’m not one of those folks who believes, using my model, that ignoring the unpleasant windows means they’ll disappear or automatically transform into feel good windows.

On the other hand, have you ever had an experience something like this?:

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You wake up on Saturday morning, after a week of crappy days, look around your domicile and want to burn the place down and start over. Everything looks awful. Disorderly, in need of paint or major (professional) cleaning, beyond reclamation in the years left before retirement. You desperately hope there is, in fact, the opportunity to reincarnate, because this lifetime is toast.

Or,

You wake up on Saturday morning, after a week wherein you were selected Employee of the Week and you got a raise. Enough to trade up to a Toyota. You look around. What a quaint and comfy little nest you and your family have created. Those handprints on the wall are from when Billy and Sally were just learning to walk. How sweet that they’re still there. All those stacks of books and unopened junk mail are how artists live, and you’re sort of an artistic type. That’s it! This ambience of quirky casual just shows you know what’s really important, and it’s not neatness. Listen to the birdies! I’ll bet the neighborhood cats just love skittering through that tall grass. Why not let it go another weekend before you mow it?

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See? How you’re feeling, generally speaking, makes such a difference in how you look at “problems.”

To get back to my model, at some point you will, indeed, want to take a look at the windows showing things that you’d like to transform. I submit - and I believe the mental health care community is with me on this - that you increase the likelihood of transforming yourself and your life experience when you fricking feel good and you make it more likely you’ll just keep fricking things up when you try to solve problems or do much of anything when you feel like @#$%.

I submit you have to feel good to do good. I’ll grant you that sometimes the best way to start feeling good is to start doing good, but I’ll also argue that it works best the other way round.

[I'm sorry: I think the preponderance of the evidence is that doing anything that really qualifies as "good" requires "good" energy. When you're not operating on "good" energy, the odds that you'll be able to start anything "good" are somewhere between "fat effing chance" and "when they start selling sno-cones in hell." One way or another you're going to need a transfusion of at least mild relief to get you started. Situations involving four-way emergency flashers could be the exception.]

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So, I recommend a practice of knowing which of your Inner Control Panel windows are showing happy movies. Learn to immediately click on one of them whenever you start feeling like dog pucky on God’s walking shoes. For me, the kitty window is my “go to” window. I love our two indoor kitties. They represent absolute unselfconscious spiritual purity. Zen Cats. Anytime I click on the cat window I immediately transcend my hopeless self and feel better. Works every time.

Now we come to denial.

If you tell people you are living some version of my model - ignoring the @#$% that makes you feel bad, focusing on what makes you feel good - at least some of the folks considering your approach to solving problems will tell you ”you’re in denial.”

I suggest you do what I’m learning to do. Tell them - politely - some version of this:

“Damn skippy. But I think of it as creative denial.”

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No matter how “aware” you think you’re finally becoming, at age 58 following about 52 years of complete spiritual myopia, it apparently remains possible to act like a complete bung.

Last night our 24-year old son reported his intention to begin looking for a place of his own, after a year of re-booting by living at home and working at the local Safeway.

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Because the “re-booting” came after about four years of decidedly mixed results from his first experiment with living on his own, I opened my yawper and expressed my opinion that moving out was a bad idea. First, it made no economic sense to pay rent to live in the same town when his mother and I are happy to have him around. We cheerfully charge no room and board, with the idea that he can begin to save for … whatever’s next. Second, if he was going to move out, it made more sense to arrange some kind of shared-living, to at least reduce the tab a little.

That far, the reasoning was sound, although it still was arguably no business of mine to offer it when it hadn’t been solicited. He was announcing his intention, not offering a topic for debate.

The next thing out of my yawper was way over the line. It went something like this:

“The worst thing in the world would be if we had to give you money to pay rent, like last time you rented, when you can live here for free.”

I’m lucky he didn’t smother me with one of the thirteen foofy pillows in and around the couch. [Those things breed.] Instead, he just tried to hide the immediate sting from my comment and protested that I was trying to guilt trip him into staying.

That’s not at all what I was trying to do. His mother and I would both love to see him living reasonably successfully on his own. We know it will happen. What I was doing was actually worse:

I was telling him that he was doomed to fail, again, like the last time. That he was at the mercy of his past. Probably forever.

Why would I try to saddle someone I love with something as crappy as that? Fear, I suppose, but even more insidious than fear: I was projecting my belief that I am doomed to fail in the same ways, over and over again, onto my doing-his-best-to-figure-it-all-out innocent son. What a @#$%-ing curse to put on somebody. Or, on myself, for that matter.

I know better. Way better. I know we are not our history. We are marvellous spiritual beings having a Time and Space adventure. But, we are not bound by Time and Space. The real “we” transcends Time and Space.

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Speaking of saddles, I was somehow required to watch Dr. Phil the other night. You know what? @#$% Dr. Phil and the horse he rode in on. He may be able to effect short-term changes by shaming his “guests” based on their past behavioral history, but long-term transformation in behavior, in my not-so-humble opinion, has to come from a transformation in self-image and self-esteem. You have to feel better before you can do better. Feeling like a @#$% may cause you to do whatever you have to do to make the @#$%-ty feeling stop, but it doesn’t have the power to transform you.

[What I did to my son is the opposite of helping him with his self-esteem. I basically took an axe to his self-esteem, by telling him his future is shackled to his past failures. I submit that what Dr. Phil does, at least on-air, is a version of what I did to my son.]

I will grant that the Texas Tyrant has an approach that probably works to transform self-esteem with certain types of people. [The same type as the basketball players who have accolades for their former Indiana basketball coach, Bobby Knight, who created desired short-term behavior changes by throwing chairs, grabbing faces, and generally forcing players to “man up,” if for no other reason than to prove to the @#$-hole that he was wrong about what he called them.]

When I commit an outrageous error like I have admitted to here, my son sometimes says, “hey, don’t go all Dr. Phil on me.”

As long as I’m spouting opinions, I am reminded of something Dan Savage, columnist for Seattle’s The Stranger, once said on Bill Maher’s Real Time:

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“I can explain a lot of cultural differences, at least between former European colonies, this way:

“Canada was settled by the French.”

“Australia was settled by convicts and prisoners.”

“The United States was settled by Puritans.”

Amen, brother. When both major Presidential candidates know they have to appear at Rick Warren’s megachurch and prove their Christian moral fiber, or risk significant political consequences, you know we still have major socio-cultural self-esteem issues.

[Imagine anything like that happening in France or Australia or Great Britain or even Canada. What a sad political and spiritual joke.]

I’ve apologized to my son for demeaning the beautiful being that he is [and we are], acknowledging that I sure as hell don’t like it when somebody tells me I’m doomed to keep making the same mistakes, just because I made them before.

I hope he “mans up” and refuses to listen to me if I say anything like that, god forbid, ever again. I hope he’s better than I and believes that I ‘m not doomed to keep making the same mistake.

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Like a half-billion or so others, give or take, I’m a NetFlixer. [I wasn’t sure which was more frightening, the invasion of Georgia by the Russkies or the 3-day breakdown in NetFlix’ delivery system. So far as I know, these events were unrelated, but both scared the bejeebers out of me.]

The downside of NetFlix is that their blurb and rating system isn’t absolutely reliable - how could it be - so, sometimes, when you take a chance on something that is described as pure peach, you find out five minutes into it, after setting up your whole evening to watch it, that you’ve got a rotten tomato.

But, sometimes, you discover something that makes up for all the stinky fruit. Rocket Science is my most recent highly recommended experience of that.

Roger Ebert compares Rocket Science to Academy Award nominee, Juno, which is an obvious analogue, including a similarly non-cliched Alt-Rock soundtrack, this time with movie characters covering Violent Femmes material and luminous tracks from Eef Barzely of Clem Snide. [Juno had Moldy Peaches, who, by the way, “jelled,” pardon the pun, right here in my little town of Port Townsend.]

[Bonus: At the end of this paean I’ve embedded the YouTuber of Eef Barzely’s music video of the “theme track” of the movie.]

For me, this was one of those viewing experiences where I can’t sit still, because the thing is so unbelievably excellent. I sometimes have to stand and shake off the euphoria. More excellent, in my view, than even the shoulda-won-Oscar Juno.

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[Read Rog’s entire review here.]

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Here’s Eef Barzely from Clem Snide:

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Absolutely. I don’t say that lightly, either.

One of the internal struggles always going on for me is that, on the one hand, I love to write things: Attempts at clear and precise letters and emails to clients, 500 words a day in my novel [sadly, that’s still only one day a week. @#$%!], and occasional posts to a couple of blogs. On the other hand, I feel foolish telling people what I think will work for them. In my mind, the “those who can’t do, teach” witticism should scare the @#$% out of anyone who believes it could be true.

If you aren’t “doing it” successfully, yourself, you shouldn’t be teaching it. [I know there are some exceptions to this, but having to justify them as exceptions only “proves the general rule,” as they say.]

I was in my late 40’s when I finally pulled the last leg free of the bear trap of fundamentalist religion. While trapped, I developed some funky, negative beliefs about personal success and money, two specific parts of a generally badly skewed fundamentalist belief system.

Limping badly, I entered my 50’s adrift on a sea of deep, dark anxiety. [Ain't mixing metaphors fun!?] Ironically, that old belief system led me to violate my own internal GPS instruction to drive in a straight line into some kind of spiritual ministry. Unfortunately, I belonged to a small cultish sect that had no room for more ministers, so I ended up commencing a 30 year frustrating effort to succeed as a lawyer, a profession that still, 30 years later, creates more stress, resistance, and chronic low-grade terror than one’s work, generally speaking, ought to. That said, while my old pray-wait-hope guidance system never worked very well, at least I felt like I was going somewhere. [A one-way ticket to Heaven is what I thought I was paying for.]

As mentioned, by my early 50’s I was desperately searching for a replacement system, since I certainly didn’t trust my own rusted and frozen internal guidance. Today, I am happy to report that I have arrived at a place, just a little more than a year from 60, where I can say, like the old fundamentalist bumper stickers my church friends had, “I Found It.”

It’s actually something that I first discovered in my King James Bible, and still dearly love to quote.

“And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.

“Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive [them], and ye shall have [them].”

Mark 11:22-24, KJV

Traditional Christians call that The Law of Faith. New Thought Christians sometimes called it The Law of Correspondence. What shows up in your life will correspond to what you expect to show up. “As above, so below. As within, so without.” If you believe that something is already true or existent, even though it hasn’t yet “manifest” in physical reality, [i.e., it's in the “as above” or “as within” state], then it must manifest in time and space. [The “so below” or “so without” part of the equation.]

New Age or Personal Transformation teachers presently call it The Law of Attraction. They each have different ways of describing it, and each has their own emphasis about practicing or “using” the Law of Attraction, but they’re talking about the same thing.

My own favorite teachers, Esther and Jerry Hicks and The Teachings of Abraham, have made practicing The Law of Attraction so simple it seems too simple. But, it works.

Did you like that Beach Boys’ song, Good Vibrations, as much as I did? As many teachers point out, we live in a vibrational cosmos. What we think of as “solid matter” is nothing but wavicles, collapsed probability waves ["waves" being “vibrations” or “oscillations”]. Your five senses - touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing - are completely dependent on these oscillations and vibrations. Brain scientists talk about alpha, beta or theta “brain waves.”

The Law of Attraction folks believe, with lots of good reasons, that how you’re “vibrating,” especially emotionally, has a large influence on what other “vibrations” show up in your life experience. If everything is connected, at the vibrational level of reality - there’s a bunch of good science that says it is - why would it be odd to think that your personal vibrations could hook-up with similar vibrations, “attracted” into your experience in the form of apparently solid events, circumstances, even objects?

Esther Hicks, via The Teachings of Abraham, has reduced this to something anyone who can handle minimum specs cognition can understand and practice:

“Learn how to generate a good feeling vibe on the inside regardless of what’s happening on the outside.” You can choose your vibe. It takes about 30 - 60 days to cultivate the habit of Good Vibrations. It may require boycotting CNN and the newspaper, if you’ve been paying too much attention to them for most of your life. If you go blabbing your new practice to others, I can guaran-darn-tee that some of them, including members of your immediate family, will tell you you’re “in denial” and you really just need a practice of doing more yardwork and generating a larger paycheck by working more or harder.

They’re actually dead right: You will be learning a form of Creative Denial.

Yestderday, driving to work after reading the latest Hicks’ book and feeling a renewed commitment to Creative Denial, I decided to set aside the daily habituated internal meditation on “Omigod, will I be able to pay all those bills for another month / what if my phone stops ringing with new business,” and I substituted this awareness:

“Wow, all this green stuff growing is incredible. It’s everywhere! Those chrysanthemums are surreal. Look at that beauuutiful cat. Omigod! There’s that doe and her twin fawns. Animals are so pure, so unstressed most of the time, so unselfconscious. What great teachers they are. It’s going to be 70 again today. Holy Moses, I love it when women dress for 70 degrees! I’ll bet that book comes today, if not today, tomorrow. Yeah, baby. Etc., etc..”

In about 45 seconds I was in a great altered state. Even if all I “attracted” or “manifest” was more Good Vibes, it was worth the exercise.

Then, here’s what happened this morning:

About 8 a.m., before Spouse had even dressed and joined me upstairs, two large trucks from “Dave’s Tree Service” showed up. I knew Spouse had been talking about hiring Dave to do some tree removal and limbing, as part of her Personal Domestic Transformation. I have been around long enough to know that two large trucks calculates out to about $200/hr.. We had not yet had the $200/hr. discussion, so I was bemused.

A 3-Way conversation between Pat [Dave’s son], Spouse, and me, created a working agreement: Dave’s Tree Service would provide a maximum of $1,000-worth of the aforementioned Tree Service. That’s something a lawyer, even a reluctant one, could understand and agree to.

Now, I had two major ways to enter the Post-Agreement Era:

1. Damn it, Spouse should have consulted me. Geez, Louise, how can she get on my case about money-stuff when she’s spending thousands over the last few months on a patio and landscaping? I must have looked like a real loser to Dave’s Tree Service. What kind of a man doesn’t do this stuff himself, or at least get out there and supervise, instead of letting his wife do it, for chrissakes? You know what, I am a Loser. This is out of control. How can we pay for this shit when I hate my job? @#$%!, here I am, almost 60, I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up, and my life is being flushed down the crapper by two Tree Service guys who think I’m a wiener.

2. Wow! Spouse is happier than I’ve seen her in years. This domestic transformation she’s ramrodding seems almost miraculous to someone like me, who can figure out how to merge a non-profit corporation with a for-profit LLC and not freak out the IRS, but is overwhelmed by what it will take to clear out the crap from under the deck. Miracles are pretty damn cool, especially the way Spouse is glowing. Good Lord, all the energy flowing around here this morning - especially that one tree guy who so obviously loves his work and really knows what the hell he’s doing - is turning me on, and I don’t mean that way. I mean I feel energized - duh - and I think I’ll tackle that Trustee’s Deed recording snafu and get a couple of other things knocked off my I Don’t Want To-Do-But-Have-To-Anyway List. So this is what it feels like to get @#$% done!

I’m telling you, even though I’m a newbie, only a few years into this:

“Change your Vibe, change your Life.”

SPACER

In this case the proper application of the Law of Attraction is actually to dampen — not to magnify — your emotions, such that the new level you want to reach begins to feel normal, expected, and believable. Otherwise you’re holding yourself in a state of disbelief. If reaching your goal seems like a miracle or a monstrous windfall, you’re actually pushing it away from you.

Steve Pavlina

Damn, I hate to just be a shill for other people’s material, but this is too good not to point you to: “Money and the Law of Attraction”