Creating My Own Life
In all the books I’ve read about the Law of Attraction, the teachers always make a point, usually in the very beginning of the book, to remind the reader that he/she is 100% reponsible for everything that happens in their lives because of how they govern, or do not govern, their thoughts and emotions. It’s a really tough concept and I really struggle with it.
I Can Think For Myself, Thanks
I used to think I didn’t really have control over my thoughts. If somebody said something hurtful, surely I had no choice but to be hurt? At the time, I certainly didn’t think so. What they said was hurtful, so I reacted by being hurt or offended. If someone called me “fatty two by four” as a child, or looked down at me for being heavy as an adult, I thought I had absolutely no choice but to be hurt by those actions.
If I’m not paying attention to my thoughts and emotions, it can still take a while for me to realize I do indeed have a choice on how I respond to various situations. I’ve been so indoctrinated to believe I have to respond to a certain situation in a certain way, I can quickly forget I do have options. It’s been slow going to get my head in a place where I remember I am free to make my own decisions about how I feel without putting myself through too much grief before I get there. My goal is to always remember, I have perfect freedom to feel any way that enters my mind about what they’re saying or doing. I do not have to let myself be defined by someone else, ever.
In fact, Jack Canfield in his wonderful book The Success Principles(TM): How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be starts his book with this important concept.
If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes the level of your achievements, the results you produce, the quality of your relationships, the state of your health and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings – everything. (Pg. 3)
In watching the DVD’s of Esther Hicks as Abraham, they come back to this very important topic time and again as people in the audience struggle to accept this concept. Abraham states that every experience we’ve ever had in our lives, we’ve brought to us with our thoughts and emotions. While I would give children as pass on this, I think it’s important to start teaching the concept at a very early age.
The very extreme ugliness is really hard to accept as being the responsibility of the victim and victimizer. For instance, it’s very difficult to believe that six million Jews collectively, if unconsciously, decided to be fodder for Hitler’s furnaces. I still don’t get that one.
Let’s Not Get So Extreme
I think we can, in most cases eliminate the extreme and go with a more day-to-day example to understand the concept. I thought there was a perfect example in The Secret. Bill Harris talks about a young gay man who was getting harassed every place he went. The poor guy was getting beat up on the street and picked on by his co-workers . He had a really miserable life until he was introduced to the concept of the Law of Attraction. He turned his thoughts away from expecting to be picked on and harassed. He kept these positive pictures as primary in his head and eventually, the coworkers who were giving him problems either quit or were transferred. I believe he stopped having problems with street vandals because he started carrying himself differently. He didn’t walk about like a victim so the steet vandals perceived his strengths and left him alone.
Because the changes in his life were so quick and so profound, I think it’s really important to grasp the concept of what he did. If we don’t, we’ll tend to say, “He did it, but I don’t think that’ll work for me.” He turned his thoughts and his emotions away from expecting any kind of trouble and he got the peaceful existence he was so craving.
Esther Hicks as Abraham is always saying, “If you want something different, you’ve got to tell a different story.” If we keep harping about “what is”, we’ll never get what we want. Our thoughts and our emotions have to put out energy towards what we want. If we want to move to a different place in our lives, we’re going to have to tell a different story. The young man we’ve been talking about got a profoundly different life very quickly when he started telling a very different story about how is life was going to be. He took charge and created the situation to his liking.
We’ll be coming back to this concept a lot, as MinuteMan and I really work toward implementing the Law of Attraction in our own lives. It’s going to be very interesting as we start telling our day to day stories on how things are going in our desire to create to perfectly beautiful perfectly healthy bodies.