This whole process of deliberate creating is really quite simple, but not always easy. At least, not at first. In fact, I'd be inclined to say it's a bitch. But once you get the hang of how you're focusing and flowing your energy, and see what the all-too-obvious results of that are, it becomes a snap. Well, almost!
Let's do a quick review before diving in deeper, and take a look at how far we've gotten into the Four Steps of Deliberate Creation.
We've reasonably examined Step One:
Identify what you DON'T want.
We've moderately examined Step Two:
Identify what you DO want.
And we've taken a pass at Step Three:
Find the feeling place of your Want.
Now we're getting to the real guts of Step Three, the tough part: learning how to feel good about something we want and don't have.
You know as well as I do that our usual thinking has been along the lines of, “When what's over there comes here, then I can be happy,” or “When I have the right body, then I can feel good about myself.” “When I'm making more money, then I'll be rid of stress.” The old gotta-find-a-way-to-fix-it-so-I-can-behappy syndrome.
Yet it's been precisely that kind of thinking that has made our lives so difficult. When circumstances have not suited us (which is more times than not), our first reaction has always been to search for physically aggressive remedies to remove it, release it, repair it, correct it. We are, after all, physical beings. “Don't like it? No problem!” Whack, bang, smack: fix it!
But, if whatever it is we're trying to accomplish doesn't get fixed, or it seems too big to change, or too overwhelming to attain in a time frame which suits us, we get all disgruntled and frustrated. And you already know the results of that scenario; in the energy of our disgruntledness and frustration, we're simply attracting a whole lot more of whatever it is we're trying so darn hard to fix.
My old college friend Liz had lived with her husband for years in a well-to-do area of Arizona, raising two children and working as a volunteer for her favorite humanitarian organizations.
When her husband, Clint, died recently, Liz was faced with some rough decisions. She hadn't worked for three decades, but getting some money coming in was mandatory. The family had moved into a large new home only three years before Clint's death, a home that came with hefty payments but very little equity, so that selling the new place to purchase a smaller one with smaller payments was not an option. The worst part was, Clint had left very little life insurance.
Without warning, Liz found herself between a rock and a hard place. If she sold the house, there wouldn't be enough to buy a smaller one. If she kept it, she was facing payments she couldn't afford. Sure, the kids offered to help, but that would provide her with only temporary relief.
Liz's one talent was her artwork. She was an accomplished watercolor artist and her paintings of the Arizona desert were a delight to behold. She had never sold much commercially except to admiring friends, but now she found herself with the enticing possibility (if not necessity) of becoming a full-time professional artist. Being a gutsy gal, she decided to go for it amidst protests from her offspring that she should find something more traditional, like a sales job with a local department store.
Between what Clint had left her, their small savings, and what she borrowed from the kids, Liz had enough to keep her going for about a year. But every time we talked, it was, “Gosh, I haven't sold anything yet, I don't know if this is going to work or not. I've got to sell something pretty soon or I don't know what I'll do.”
Liz was not a student of flowing energy, nor did she care to be. She'd listen politely to my sometimes not-so-gentle suggestions that she stop focusing on her current negative conditions (lack of sales) and start focusing seriously on what she wanted and how that felt to her. Over and over we talked. Over and over Liz would say, “I don't think I can hold out much longer. I'm getting so nervous I can't even concentrate on my painting. What am I going to do? I'm terrified.”
One day I just couldn't hold back any longer. Acting out of good old “tough love” for a dear, dear friend, I started talking low, slow, and very firmly.
“All right, my friend, if you want to sink your own ship, be my guest. I wash my hands. Enjoy your misery, and please don't call again with your problems. You could turn them around in no time if you'd stop bellyaching, so whenever you're ready, give a call. I mean it, no more calls until you're ready to take control.”
I felt like a heel, but I wasn't going to become another link in her Chain of Pain.
For three weeks, all was quiet on the Arizona phonewaves. When the call came, I could have cried. “You win, I give up. What do I do?” And she meant it!
First I got her talking about all the things she didn't want. That was easy: lose the house, lose the respect of her friends and children, lose the chance to paint professionally.
Then we started on the Wants, piece by piece. We zeroed in on the house first as that was the most pressing … that, and any other subject relating to money. Liz could speak of nothing else because that's all she'd been thinking about. Her paintings weren't selling, so all the money was going in the wrong direction … out!
“Okay, Liz, the first thing we're going to do is get you feeling good and vibrating differently.”
“Feeling good?! You twit! How on earth do you expect me to feel good when I'm about to lose everything Clint and I ever had? That's why I'm calling you, to figure out how to sell my paintings. If they'd start selling, everything would be okay and I'd feel as good as you want me to feel.”
That was precisely the problem. All Liz could see in front of her was the lack of what she wanted. The more she looked at all she didn't have, and all that was not coming in, the worse she felt. The worse she felt, the more frantically she'd run around in circles trying to turn it around. The more she ran, the worse she felt, and the worse she felt, the more nothing sold. She was focused completely and perpetually on the grim conditions of the moment, believing them to be the sum total of her reality. Facts were facts. Her attempt at supporting herself through her art was not working. “I've got to face reality,” she'd sigh with resignation.
But I kept at it and finally got her turned around to talking about why she wanted to keep the house, which at the time she felt was a preposterously stupid thing to be talking about.
“All right, all right! I want to keep the house so I won't have to move.” (That was a Don't Want, but I wasn't about to confuse her with details.)
“And why don't you want to move?”
Suddenly there was a softening as she said, “Well, because Clint and I loved this place so, and it still feels like ‘our’ place, like Clint is still here with me.” (Her resistance to Feel Good energy was softening.) “None of that feeling has gone, and I do so cherish the way it makes me feel … except when I think about having to make the payments.”
Bit by bit, we worked more into her love of their home until I heard such a sweet joy coming through. She was feeling good, and then some. Her valve was wide open.
“Liz! Stop! Right this moment I want you to feel what you're saying.”
“What do you mean?”
“How does what you're saying make you feel?”
“Well, wonderful, of course! Nurtured, taken care of … my God, safe! Oh yes! It feels so warm and safe!”
“Good! Now hold on to that feeling. Got it?”
“Yes, I've got it.”
“Feels good, doesn't it!”
“Sure it does, it feels great.”
“All right. From that place of safety, from that place of feeling so good, think about how you'll feel when you're easily making payments on the house. Never mind how you're going to do it. Never mind you can't do it right now. Where you're going has nothing to do with where you are now. Nothing! You've got to remember that. This condition you see yourself in doesn't mean a thing. Once and for all, take your focus off it or you'll never get where you want to be. Got it?
“I think so, but how …”
“Never mind how! Your only job is to find ways to feel good, and to forget about what's staring you in the face. You want to find ways to feel a little better, and a little better, and a little better until you feel pretty good, and when you feel pretty good, in those moments think about making those easy payments on your house. Can you do that?”
“Oh, I don't know …”
“Okay, how does being able to make those payments make you feel?”
“Terrific!”
“Of course. Think about the thrill of selling your paintings, not from a place of ‘gotta-do-it, gotta-do-it,’ but with a ‘yeowee, I AM doing it’ kind of elation. When you think about it from that perspective, how does that feel?”
There was a long pause, then, “Oh gosh, freer than a bird. Heavenly!”
“Right! That's the feeling! That's what I want you to go to … that feeling … all the time. Liz, take your focus off your current negative conditions. Stop looking at them, stop thinking about them; that only makes you feel worse. You've got to remember that your only job is to feel good. Period! Then let the universe take care of the rest.”
Liz felt so wonderful talking about how she and Clint loved the house that she figured she could re-create that feeling fairly easily. At any rate, that's where she began.
It took three months and a phone bill that would kill a cow, but at the end of that third month (which just happened to coincide with the end of the year Liz had originally given herself to make good with her art), not only had Liz sold enough paintings to cushion herself for a while, but she had acquired an enthusiastic agent (or whatever you call them in the art world), she was scheduled for her first local showing, and she had been commissioned with a fair amount of dollars up front to do a small mural in a private office building.
Liz got the message and is now very careful as to how she flows her energy. In truth, I'm not sure which of us was more elated at the turnaround.
Liz was just doing what we all do, running around like a chicken with its head cut off as she tried to fix all the circumstances of the moment that scared her. Like a drowning person struggling against the lifeguard, the more frightened and hopeless she felt, the harder she fought with negative energy to find ways to remedy her situation.
She was looking at the mess she was in—her disastrous conditions—finding them not to her liking, and frantically wondering how to change them through “normal” physical means. And the more she tried to fix-fix-fix, the more negative energy she flowed and the worse things got. Everywhere she looked from within the dark hole she thought was her reality, she saw nothing but gloom.
We've all been there. When things get rough, we either brood about it or hastily plot for ways to execute damage control. Fix it, improve it, rectify it; is there one among us who hasn't mused, “If I could just get from here to there, everything would be fine!”
We are fix-it mongers, dutifully trained to respond to whatever conditions are in our face.
But fixing is resisting our natural energy. Fixing is a closed valve. Fixing is whopping negative energy.
The challenge is to take our focus off the object of our anxieties or irritations, and find the happier feeling of what we want in its place. In other words, we need to stop fixing, and start feeling good.
Let's say, for instance, your roof is old and needs to be replaced, but you don't have the money to do it right now. However, it's the rainy season, so the problem is somewhat pressing. You're also having major problems with the car, and the IRS is dunning you for back taxes.
You've got a batch of nasty conditions on your hands, none of which are going to make you feel particularly sunny as you think about them. But think about them you do. And think about them. And think about them. So of course they get bigger.
All of those negative conditions, known more endearingly as “problems,” are nothing but irksome Don't Wants, but they are so common to us and such a part of our world, we take them for granted as part of life. In fact, we wear them as honored badges of identity, a sort of one-upmanship in the sorry game of who can be the biggest victim. And naturally, the more we stew about them, or brag about them, the bigger they become.
Some negative conditions are serious problems, others simply minor annoyances, yet whatever they may be, they are so prevalent, so all-pervasive that we've made them a way of life. However, negative conditions are nothing more than the result of our own past focus … and feelings … and energy flow. That's all they are. Our negative energy flow was the cause, and the unpleasant conditions are the effect.
There is only one way to stop the messes in our lives from getting worse: stop focusing on them. If we can accept—from the depths of our being—that our problems are not caused by our boss, our mate, our raucous kids, the IRS, or the drunk on the freeway, then we have a chance to wipe those problems away in the same way we attracted them: by our energy flow. Only this time, through a significantly different vibration.
I'm not going to pull any punches; this is tricky. Staring at—and responding to—what's in our face is what we do. To change that means we would have to give up our cherished right to have—and agonize over—our precious problems.
Well, fear not. As long as we are physical, we will always be faced with conditions we neither like nor want (otherwise we'd be living in Sameville), so there will always be plenty of problems around for you to focus on if you should want to cut loose on occasion and flood yourself with negative energy (as I frankly enjoy doing from time to time). But our goal now is to change the way we react to our unwanted conditions so they cease being the focal point of our lives.
Because of our upbringing, and because of attitudes passed down over countless generations, we believe that what we see in the moment, and what we are experiencing in the moment, is the way it has to be until we either find a way to eradicate or accept it. We can see it, we're surely experiencing it, so in our book that makes it reality. And yet reality—real reality—is nothing more than the result of how we've been flowing our energy.
Let's say, for instance, you're living in a body you don't much like. You call that reality, which equates to that which is unchangeable and must be accepted.
Or let's say you're currently living in a declining economy which is affecting your income. You call that reality, a potentially disastrous condition over which you have no control.
“That's life; accept it!”
“That's the way things are.”
“You can't fight City Hall.”
“Stop knocking your head against a brick wall.”
“That's the way of the world.”
“Learn to take life on its terms.”
“Within every life a little rain must fall.”
“Get your head out of the clouds.”
“Life isn't fair.”
“Wise up and face reality.”
Here's the flash: We do not have to face up to or put up with anything. All we have to do is learn to flow our energy differently, for nothing—nothing—affects our experience except how we flow our energy. NOTHING!!!
With some things in our lives, those that are pleasing to us, our valve is naturally open. Because those conditions gratify us, our positive energy is attracting more positive things.
But as we look at the majority of negative conditions (problems) around us, our valve is slammed shut. Our connection to our Source energy is barely enough to keep us breathing, and we wouldn't know a vibration of joy if it walked up and smacked us in the face. We're annoyed at this, steamed at that, worried about them, wondering how to correct this, complaining about that, afraid of God-knows-what-all, depressed over everything, and vibrating such unceasing currents of negative energy all the time, it's a wonder we ever have any moments of joy at all.
Just because you're living in the “reality” of a jobless market does not mean you can't attract a great job.
Just because houses are not selling does not mean you can't attract a qualified, delighted buyer.
Just because your body is not as strong as others does not mean you can't attract the strength to win the 400 meter race.
Just because you've never worked in that market does not mean you can't attract the ability to be successful at it.
Just because you've never been able to stop smoking does not mean you can't attract the willingness to stop right now.
Just because you've had two divorces does not mean you're doomed to attract another catastrophe.
Whatever mess—or happiness—we are living in this very moment, whether it be as an individual, a family, a nation, or a planet, that mess is the sole and direct outcome of how we were feeling—and flowing energy—yesterday, and the day before that, and the years before that. The Law of Attraction doesn't work a little here and a little there. It simply is: for you, for me, for the cosmos. We magnetically attract what we vibrate, and we have created it all, from fender benders to global wars.
So, from this moment on, never, ever accept reality as something to which you must resign yourself. Take your thoughts beyond whatever is in front of your nose that you don't like and put them on what you do like. If you don't, your so-called reality will never change. Granted, some ugly things may be glaring you in the face right now, or threatening you, or looking like a hopeless situation, but they are not set in stone! They must never be reluctantly tolerated.
Unpleasant reality is nothing but an effect caused by negative energy flow. We can either live with those effects and suffer, or circumvent them and have a ball.
As a kid, did you ever jump off a high dive? Do you remember that very first time you climbed up … and up … and up? Each step seemed to take you farther away from safety, but even though you were scared, you kept on going.
Finally came the top of the ladder. You walked tentatively out to the end of the board. Your heart pounded so hard you could barely hear the kids below shouting you on. The water seemed five miles away. You didn't really want to do this thing, while at the same time you did. Something in you knew this was epic, the greatest moment you would ever know, that if you did this, you would never be the same. You jumped. What a rush! You made it. And indeed, your life had changed forever.
The toughest part of ungluing ourselves from the high dive habit of an ongoing problem (for that's all problems are … are habits) is forcing ourselves to release our preoccupation with it. Like so:
You don't have to change it; You just have to stop focusing on it!
Is it tough? Yes! Can it be done? You bet!!! But you have to start someplace, and that someplace is a decision that, somehow, you're going to change your focus. Then comes actually doing it, changing your focus to something more pleasant so you can change your energy. It is impossible to solve a problem in the same frequency in which it was created, so you make a decision that for as long as it's with you, that problem will no longer be the focal point of your life. Like having a cut on your finger; you know it's there and yes it hurts when you think about it, but you don't allow it to govern your everyday living. You believe it will heal and go away, and so it does.
Just remember, the most important part to changing an unwanted condition is simply: you don't have to change it; you just have to stop thinking about it! All it takes is that willingness to jump.
The moment you recognize you're focusing on the condition with your worry-motor running (or ticked-off motor, or blame motor, etc.), find something else, anything else to think about that will get you to feeling even a tiny bit better than you do at present. And find it right now!
Switch your thoughts to your mate (if you've got a great relationship), your home, a song, your doggie, your new sweatshirt, a chocolate sundae, making love, your upcoming vacation, your last vacation, a special restaurant, your youngster asleep. ANYthing!!! Make yourself do this, staying there until you can feel your mood begin to change—which means your energy has changed—no matter how slight.
Once you make the feeling switch, then start talking—out loud—about what it is you want (that's “want,” not “don't want”) in place of your unwanted condition. By doing that, your focus is now off the condition, your Intent motor is running in its place, and you've gotten your valve open enough to begin the turnaround. And for heaven's sake, never mind that your Replacement Want may seem impossible. Just get into it and forget the “how tos.”
If you can't get into your Want/Intent feeling mode, never mind. Just stay in the feeling of some pleasant new focus for as long as you can. The longer (and more often) you can stay in that higher frequency, the quicker your unwanted condition will begin to dissipate. Conversely, the more you retain your focus on whatever has been bothering you, the longer it will stay around.
When you just can't seem to get your focus off the condition, start some soothing talking to yourself, out loud, much like a loving mom or dad might comfort a little one. Tell yourself all the comforting things a youngster would want to hear: that it's going to be okay, that things are in the process of changing, that you've always been safe and always will be, that you have nothing to fear.
Keep talking warmly for as long as it takes you to feel that subtle little switch happen, and you can feel your resistance to the higher energies backing down. You are relaxing into wellbeing, your resistance to that Life-giving Source energy is lessening, and you're quieting down. Stay there as long as you can, with your focus off the disturbing condition.
This is tough-love kind of talk … out loud … to yourself, one on one. But here's the trick: you need to get tough, not down on yourself. Don't you ever, ever, ever get down on yourself when you find you're focusing on an unwanted condition.
What you're after here is stern, horse-sense reasoning where you firmly point out to yourself what will transpire if you continue to focus on—and stew over—the condition. Then you tell yourself quite matter-of-factly what will happen when you remove your focus and change your vibration.
“Now look, Charlie, you got yourself into this mess, and you are going to find a way to get yourself out. But if you're going to stay in this mood and stew about it all day long, you know the situation is going to get worse. So get off your pity pot and find some dumb thing to feel good about. Hell yes, I know you don't feel like feeling good right now, but …”
Who cares if you believe it or not? Fake it until you feel the switch in feeling take place, that subtle shift in your energy.
This is an approach of hard logic. While I use it regularly and it always makes me feel better, I find I usually have to jump from this back into one of the other tricks to get more of that quieted-down Feel Good motor running full steam. But that's just me. Whatever it takes for you, go for it!
Get physical! Go for a walk, polish your car, brush your cat, buy a new suit, bake a cake, play poker, trim your flowers, go to a movie, whatever turns you on that will take your stuck focus off the condition and soften your resistance to flowing that higher energy. Once you feel the shift happen, start talking out loud, gently at first, about what you want in place of the unwanted condition.
With any of these tricks, keep in mind that old expression, “Fake it 'til you make it.” You switch focus, you talk warmly, you talk tough, you go for fun, you pretend, but the point is, you do it the moment you realize your attention is on the unwanted condition, and you stay there until you feel your feelings flip over. They will!
Once you've taken your focus off the condition and started to get that rusty valve cracked open, you're ready to really crank up your Want and get excited about it.
The shift in focus is: Away from the unpleasant Now, onto the pleasant Want. Away from the unpleasant Now, onto the pleasant Want.
If all you can muster at first is just a scrap of Feel Good about your Want, then fine. When you get to having your valve open 20 percent of the time from focusing on your Want, then celebrate! You are headed in the right direction, which sure beats vibrating 100 percent of the time about a lousy “what is.” Slowly by slowly (as my Hungarian friend used to say), that big chunk of energy that created the condition in the first place is being displaced and replaced by open valve Source energy vibrations.
Pretty soon you'll be able to vibrate at somewhere around fifty-fifty: 50 percent on the condition and 50 percent on something more pleasant. Now you're truly beginning to take control of your life; sprinklings of your desired changes will start popping up everywhere.
Ah, but the real fun comes when you get to the point of switching energies at the drop of a hat the instant you realize you're tuned to negative. Now you've jumped up to sixty-forty (60 percent with higher frequencies, 40 percent on normal), and finally up to seventy-thirty, or even eighty-twenty. At this point, right before your eyes, you'll watch new events, new people, new circumstances pour into your life as if by magic, one right after the other, to create the new occurrences you so deeply desire. Not too bad for simply feeling good.
Just remember, however fast your Want comes is directly related to how fast (and how permanently) you can switch your focus OFF what is keeping you in a negative vibration, and ON where you want to go. No matter how dire your condition may seem at the moment, it is not permanently glued to you. You just have to decide what you want in place of your problem, then provide the Feel Good frequency that will give it birth.
And please! Don't beat up on yourself if you've got a barrelful of problems, and don't try to tackle them all at once by attempting to project an assortment of unbelievable Wants. We all got ourselves into our various messes, and with some serious practice at taking control of our energy flow, we can all get ourselves out of them. Guaranteed!
Insist to yourself that you will do whatever you can to find—and maintain—any amount of Feel Good energy. And remember, the only power present conditions have over any of us is the power we give them. That's when we feel trapped, and quite frankly, we are.
But no circumstances are beyond our control. What's going on in your world at this very moment doesn't mean a thing. It is only a result, that's all it is. No matter how unyielding conditions appear to be, you can always flow Feel Good—even Feel Better—energy around them to change them. If you can know that in the deepest part of your being, the rest of this deliberate creation business will be a breeze.
It's taken me longer than I care to think about to own up to the realization that it's not what I do-do-do that makes a difference in my life, but how I'm flowing my energy. I had always been a deep believer in action being the magic word, that nothing would come to me without great effort and exertion.
The truth is that whatever it is we're wanting to fix, all the desperate things we think about doing will have precious little effect on influencing our experience. Nor does it matter how we do what we do, or how much, or how often, since most of our doing is initiated out of negative, flap-around energy rather than inspired, breeze-along activity.
Give us a situation we don't like, and, depending on our nature, we do one of two things: we throw up our hands in frustrated resignation, bowing down to accept our fate, or we leap on our big white horse, as the Lone Ranger used to do, and gallop blindfolded (rather than masked) down the trail bellowing, “Hi Ho Silver, Awayyyyyy” to frantically search for some heroic action to overcome the dastardly injustice befallen us. Either way, all we're doing is blowing up bigger what we'd like to blow out of our reality.
So let's take a look at this Action business. I call it Frantic Action, the Hi-Ho Silver syndrome, the need to do-do-do in order to fix-fix-fix. It's any type of activity we take with a closed valve.
Most of the world will agree that it's only through “doing” that all things happen. Give us a problem, and we Hi Ho Silver into Frantic Action, looking for ways to sell more, earn more, accomplish more to fix it, fix it, fix it. Yet deliberate creating is about flowing energy to attract, not about trying to push rivers upstream, which is Hi Ho Silvering.
Hi Ho Silvering never works. You just can't muscle into anyone else's world unless you've been vibrationally invited, any more than anyone can intrude on your world unless you've sent out the vibrational invitation. You can not bulldoze something into place and get the results you truly want, no matter how hard you push and shove.
Does this mean we stop doing? Of course not. We just substitute inspired doing for wasted doing by stopping our constant knee-jerk responses to everything. Then, with our focus held enthusiastically on what we prefer in life, the right moves to make come to us from a place of open valve inspiration. Action becomes a joy instead of a “have to.” Ideas abound. We open to the Creative Life Force and find ourselves being led step by step, easily and flawlessly, to wherever it is we wish to go.
The miracle has happened. We are no longer responders; we have become deliberate creators.
Let's face it, we're always going to have contrast, meaning things we don't like. That's what we signed up for, and frankly, that's what we most enjoy.
But whether it's Godzilla coming around the corner or a flea bite, no matter how bad or irksome the conditions may appear, they deserve no more of our attention than enough to warn us how we're flowing our energy. That's all! They are not the end of the line.
When a feeling-alarm rings in response to a condition, and you get that knee-jerk response to Hi Ho Silver into Frantic Action, just cool down and relax. That changes the thought, which changes the feeling, which changes the vibration and allows the universe and your Expanded Self to take over.
And so, contrary to popular belief, you do not have to get all your ducks in a row before allowing yourself to feel good. The only thing you have to do in regard to any condition is to stop looking at the fool thing, stop responding, and find a way to feel better.
Habits of a lifetime—and eons of inherited genes—die hard. Just do your best to remember that whatever you're currently living is only the result of past energy flow.
Then take a quiet step back from the immediacy of the situation to catch a glimpse of that broader view.
Remember that “needing” something to change will always flow negative energy and hold it to you. Finding a way to become excited about what it will be changing into will flow positive energy and get the desired revisions started.
Stop being uptight over anything. Instead, tell yourself in all gentleness that however unpleasant the conditions may seem to you now, they are not going to control you, and that yes, you absolutely can find a way to open your valve in spite of what's happening. And you will!
Then your answers will come, opportunities will come, and you'll soon find more ways to alter your situation than you can imagine.
So bless the rotten conditions if you can, for without them you could not possibly know what you don't want. Cast your gaze to what can be rather than what is, and dive into all the wonderful feelings—not longings—of how fantastic it will be when you're there. Then, what is there, comes here.