part0008

What happens during your visualization and meditation sessions is important… but what do you do during the rest of your waking hours? What do you do with the rest of your time? More pointedly, how do you feel and what do you think when you’re not actively turned inwards? Most people who adopt the misguided notion that visualization is a “sending out” or “broadcasting” of intentions wrongly believe that if they broadcast their intentions strongly enough 3 times a day, whatever they do in between, for the rest of the day does not matter.

In fact, whatever you do during the remaining 15 hours matters just as much, or even more! Assuming that you sleep for 8 hours, visualize and meditate collectively for 1 hour a day, and then engage in your usual activities for the remaining 15 hours of the day… How you feel in those 15 hours is of crucial importance . If you can understand this principle, you’ll achieve great progress in whatever you’re doing. Here’s a quick question: How do you feel during most of your day? Do you feel at peace and secure? Do you feel positively expectant? Do you feel a sense of lightness, deep trust in the Universe and peaceful most of the time? If you do… then I surmise that things must be going very well for you, even though we have not met in person. Things must turn out well for you … for it is Universal Law!

You don’t even have to feel good “all” the time. That again, is another misconception. You just need to feel good “most” of the time, and soon you’ll find all the good things starting to flow into your experience. Let me give you a personal example.

Most people assume that since I write these spiritual books that I feel good absolutely 100% of the time. That can’t be further from the truth. I am just like everyone else. I have my good days, and I have my bad days. Sometimes I observe and give my attention to unwanted things, which results in me feeling sad, angry, or depressed. Sometimes I experience physical situations with others, which again invoke negative feelings. How you handle these “negative” or “unwanted” feelings is a lesson in itself. Once again, Abraham-Hicks have an analogy in which one would not deliberately paste a happy face sticker over their fuel gauge, so as not to see when their tank is running low. Or that one would not deaden the nerves on their fingers so as not to feel the burning sensation when touching a hot object. Obviously, our negative thoughts and feelings have value. Their greatest value is in teaching us that we are focused upon something bad or unwanted at the moment, and that our job is to turn away from it, to focus in the direction of where we ultimately want to go. Once again it is easy to see why individuals who believe in the notion of “broadcasting” signals to the Universe will frown upon this concept of embracing our negative feelings, because they will want to be extra careful about what they are broadcasting to the Universe at any given moment. Yet there is no broadcasting involved, the Universe picks up on all of our intents perfectly and instantaneously. The “bad” feelings are letting you know that whatever the Universe is picking up and giving you more of is not in line with what you want. That’s why it feels bad to you.

Being a conscious manifestor is something that can be done by everyone. In the opening chapter of this book, I talked about how you already have all the apparatus you need to do everything in this book. However, sticking to the practice requires some determination and inner work, especially if we have been conditioned over long periods of time to think in a certain way by society. So don’t give up if you can’t seem to direct your thoughts in the desired manner at the beginning, for you will soon get better at it. And the better you get at all of this, the easier it is to excel at it because you are already coasting in the right direction.

Let’s say I’m working happily and suddenly some worrying thoughts come up for me. They could be worrying thoughts about anything, the actual subject does not matter. For most people who believe in the outdated notion that you are trying to “attract” something from the Universe, it becomes a constant inner struggle because they are always trying to suppress such “worrying” thoughts. All their waking hours go along the lines of, “Oh no… I better stop feeling this way now before the Universe takes back my new car!” You get the idea. But this is not the way it works. You are not being “rewarded” each time you feel good and “penalized” each time you feel bad! The Universe is not working on some kind of a scoring system. So don’t be afraid if negative thoughts come into your awareness. Embrace them. They are like the fuel gauge in your car, letting you know that you have to take corrective action before something bigger happens, which is your car running out of fuel in the middle of the road!

When you notice your car running low on fuel, what do you do? You don’t start saying “Oh no, I must not feel this way! I must not believe that my car is running out of fuel! I must drive extremely slowly and carefully to avoid it running out of fuel in the middle of the road!” That would be absurd and downright hilarious in our everyday lives. But that’s exactly what most people are doing with their negative feelings! They say, “Oh no, I must not allow myself to feel bad! I must suppress all bad feelings right now and replace them with good thoughts!” Then it becomes an ongoing struggle because one can never really suppress our bad feelings without facing them head-on. They just keeping coming up over and over again for us until we do something about them. When you feel a negative thought, the most resourceful thing you can do in the moment (and the greatest help you can be to yourself) is to stop judging yourself for it. Let it be okay to feel the feeling in the moment. Let it be okay to have the thought in the moment. This very simple shift in perception will change your reality. Instead of beating yourself up over every negative thought, tell yourself that sometimes you have positive thoughts and sometimes you have negative thoughts, and it is alright to feel both of them. So take a deep breath and embrace the negative, worrying thought when it comes.

Once again, it is very useful to let the negative feeling or thought express itself fully in your physical body. Most of us are afraid of these bad feelings. This is again linked to the misplaced belief that these bad feelings are sabotaging our intentions. But remember that there is a buffer of time before anything happens? The buffer of time allows you to make timely corrections before unwanted physical manifestations happen. Let’s say you worry about your bills, and whether they will be paid. This feeling feels familiar to you, and in some kind of a perverse way, it even makes you feel good and safe. Remember what we discussed earlier about these feelings being “familiar territory”. They are something instantly recognisable by your body as a feeling of “financial worry”. Contrast this feeling with that of love which you felt earlier in this book, their signatures and blueprints are very different. The way they feel energetically is very different. Give thanks that you are able to tell the differences between the two!

Now that you feel these feelings of financial worry fully in the body, it is good to identify them. How do they feel like to you? In which part of your body do you feel them? Once again, if you adopt the old misguided notion that this is sabotaging your manifestations, you will never want to engage in this exercise. But once you understand the true nature of the Universe, and how there is value in experiences like this, you open up. You begin to see the feeling for what it is. Just a feeling, a negative thought. A worry is nothing but a negative feeling. That’s all. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Recognize the feeling for what it is — just energy. Once you begin to map out where the negative feeling is in your body, for example, as a tight lump in your throat, or as a knot in your stomach, or even a slight throbbing at the back of your neck, or tightness in your shoulders… you are allowing yourself to “feel the feelings” fully. You have come face-to-face with the feeling, and are now seeing it (quite possibly for the first time) for what it really is: Just a feeling in your body, brought on by one thought which you had earlier.

And now this is the key question to ask yourself: Do you want to believe in this feeling? If you do, you’ll go down the garden path like a lamb to slaughter. You’ll be walking down the same old familiar path of thinking up all the negative scenarios and what if’s, everything will be same-old, same-old to you. Most people who do not understand the higher nature of things will choose this first path by default. Their current level operating in the world does not allow them to choose anything else. They do not see the value in choosing anything else. Therefore, they do not and continue to create by default.

But you are different. You have been equipped with the tips and techniques in this book. You know the truths of the Universe. You know you can choose differently. And therefore, you choose differently. You choose not to believe in the thought. You choose to believe in something completely different. Suppose you have a fear or worry over whether you’ll be able to pay your bills this month. This is the initial thought that led to the fear or worry response, which is now identified as a sickening feeling in your stomach. This worrying feeling feels so familiar to you.

But if you’re able to catch yourself at this moment and remember what we have learnt earlier, you know that you can set a different intention to which the Universe responds instantly. Therefore, let’s choose something different. Choose another thought that makes you feel better. At the beginning, this takes practice but you’ll soon get the hang of this process. So let’s see: What thoughts can possibly feel better in this case? Hmm… how about: “Even though I have worried about my finances in the past, I have always been able to pay them when due. Things have always worked out for me.” This thought is just as true, and in fact, may be more true than the first negative worrying thought that came up for you! So now, after consciously choosing the second thought, you notice that the worrying or negative feelings are not as intense as before. You have indeed made a step in the positive direction. Then from there, you choose another related thought that brings you closer to where you want to feel. It may be this: “Hmm… that thought was probably a conditioned response from the past. In the past I would have worried, but I don’t now!”

And so bit by bit, you consciously choose and replace negative, unwanted thoughts that produce unwanted feelings in your body with positive thoughts that feel better. I credit Abraham-Hicks for this process because it is truly one of the few effective processes that I have found to get rid of those small, negative, resistant thoughts that may keep showing up for you. The key is to tackle these negative worry thoughts one at a time, as they arise instead of simply believing in them. If you’ll devote some time to do this consciously for most of your waking hours, you’ll find that gradually the worry thoughts subside because you have let go and released the pent up energy that was associated with each of them. Your reality will start changing too.

I can’t tell you the number of people who overlook this crucial step of managing their feelings during the remaining 15 hours of their daily lives, while focusing all their effort on what happens during the 10 - 15 minutes they spend visualizing or stating their intentions. Compared with the amount of time you spend feeling what you usually feel during the day, that 10 - 15 minutes is very little! Therefore, if you want the 10 - 15 minutes of quiet, inward activity to make a difference, you must actively manage your feelings during the remaining 15 hours or so of your waking moments.

Here are two common questions I receive from this. First, how does the simple process of recognising a negative thought, and then replacing it with a slightly better one, and another slightly better one… until you feel good help in the manifestation process? It makes all the difference . If you do it consistently and train yourself to do it all day, every day, things will start happening like magic for you. You’ll get to that magical state where doors start opening for you, and inspired manifestations start occurring for you without any “physical” action necessary.

When you can let your worry thoughts go and feel good most of the time, you will be engaged in one long, continuous visualization session throughout the day. Your manifestation effectiveness will be increased many times, because you’ll now be in a receptive state where miracles can happen for you.

Reading about this magical state is definitely no substitute for you to experience it yourself. But I would like to give you a taste of what it feels like. First of all, if you are consistent in applying the process taught above, and if you deliberately “feel better thoughts” whenever negative ones arise… you’ll soon find that the negative ones lose their emotional charge. Because you’ll be vibrating at such higher energetic levels, those lower level thoughts of fear and worry have no way of reaching you. You’ll not be able to “attract” those thoughts as easily into your thinking. They’ll simply fade away and become a thing of the past. I hardly worry nowadays. It is just a natural state of being for me today to feel good all the time, to feel at ease all the time, and to feel a deep sense of inner peace and connection with the Universe. Yet a few years ago I was a chronic worrier! I worried about everyone and everything! I worried about finances, about my future, about how I would be perceived by others. Most destructively, I believed in those worrisome thoughts! I allowed myself to go down that line of thinking… with similar unwanted results in my life. The results I observed then perpetuated more of the same thinking.

That’s why I say it takes some consistency and persistence in the beginning. After you break through that unseen barrier, when the majority of your thoughts are in the desired direction, then things get easier for you. Remember that the tipping point is when the majority (more than 50%) of your thoughts are in the direction that you want. That’s the time you start moving in the desired direction. Most people who dismiss these techniques as “too simplistic” are always looking for “big” changes. They are always looking for that one simple step, or one big / new thing which they can do that will put their request out to the Universe forever, such that they don’t ever have to worry about it again. But these are the same people who keep worrying about whether they are doing the right thing, or why their desires have not been manifested yet for most of their waking moments! Remember that the key is what you do and how you feel during the majority of your waking hours.