Gratitude Experiment: How Does It Work?

One of the ways in which gratitude increases more experiences of good for us is that it very gently opens us up to receive. How? After a few days or weeks of being on the lookout for the good that is already in our lives…and praising that good…it begins to occur to us that we live in a friendly universe filled with blessings.  And, more importantly, that we are meant to enjoy all those blessings…that it is, in fact, personal. In this way we begin to slowly open to the idea that we’re worthy of a loving, joyous and prosperous life.

It’s as if our true worthiness were sneaking up on us. And sometimes it needs to because, not feeling worthy…and therefore not accepting good…can be a tough thing for some of us to shift.  We can’t force the shift.  Sneaky is good in the case :-)

Daily proactive gratitude is quite effective at opening us up to receive more good.  So stay with it, post your gratitudes daily, and witness as you open up to receive more good.

Gratitude Experiment Day 2

The interesting thing about committing to posting at least one gratitude a day is that it’s making me look for things to be grateful for…knowing I will be posting something that evening. I’m on the lookout for good things to be grateful for.

So today, I am grateful for hands-on, interactive science museums for kids. Really…hours of fun and they’re learning something just by playing. It’s fabulous. I hope every city has one.

I’m also grateful for the color of cardinals. What an amazing red!

Thank you!

The Gratitude Experiment

Starting today…Thanksgiving Day, 2009, I am embarking on something I’m calling the Gratitude Experiment.

From today forward…and for the next 365 Days I’m am posting at least one thing for which I am grateful. It could be just one thing, or a list of things that day. The point is to focus on what is wonderful in my life and in this world.

More importantly, I want to invite everyone to post in the “comments section” at least one thing for which they are grateful that year.

Here’s the experiment part of this…I want to prove that gratitude transforms peoples lives…and ultimately, transforms the world.

The more people who do this, the more energy builds…the kind of transformational energy that transforms the world. We are transforming the world one gratitude at a time.

We want to participate in intentional gratitude, or rather “proactive gratitude.” It is active appreciation of everything around us, everything in our lives that is good, and even those things which don’t feel so good right now because every challenge in our lives has a gift hidden in it. Our part is to look for that gift and call it forth.

Intentional gratitude is an energy that multiplies our blessings and attracts more good into our lives. This fact has been proven over and over again in so many people’s lives. So let’s harness this power of gratitude by taking a few moments everyday to write down what we are grateful for. The act of writing it down and posting it for the world to see activates the law of attraction and multiplies our good quickly.

Make a commitment now, to post at least one gratitude a day here on this blog and watch your life transform.

Reclaiming Your Authentic Self, Part 1

Has this ever happened to you?

You set a goal to achieve something worthwhile, or you make a commitment to your spiritual practice, or to express your highest potential in some wonderful way, and then…

Suddenly, or incrementally, you notice you’re losing momentum. You begin to get distracted, other life demands get in the way. Or, an obstacle comes into your path that appears insurmountable. Or, fear creeps up and you begin to doubt yourself and your ability (“What was I thinking?”)

It’s a common experience. What is actually happening is that the “shadow self” has slipped into your consciousness and begins to work hard to sabotage your success.

What is the shadow self and how can we be free of its influence in our lives?
The answer is…by reclaiming our Authentic Self. In this post, I will be explaining what the shadow self is and how it works. Then, over the course of the next few days, I will reveal, step-by-step how to reclaim your Authentic self so that you may more easily achieve your goals and ultimately express your highest potential.

As expressions of the Infinite, it is natural for us to be loving, joyous, happy, fulfilled, peaceful, successful, abundant and perfect. So why doesn’t that seem to be our everyday experience? Two passages from the Bible may give us a clue.

“And God said; Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
—Genesis 1:26
“God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.” —Eccl. 7:29

Though stated in Biblical terms, the first statement is scientifically accurate. If there is one Universal Intelligence from which all creation originates, then we cannot possibly be created as anything other than in Its “image and likeness.” And if the qualities of this Universal Intelligence are love, joy, peace, harmony, abundance and perfection, then we must be also.

Therefore, in truth, we are all individualized expressions of pure love, pure joy, complete happiness, limitless peace, harmony, exquisite beauty, magnificence, absolute perfection and unbounded prosperity. This is how we were created and what we are in Truth. Let’s call this our “authentic self.”

Now, here’s the variable: we are given an important gift at inception, and that is freedom of choice. We have the choice to agree with the inherent truth of our being and live our lives from that awareness, or we have the choice to disregard it, ignore it, and push it away. Emerson stated: “…we but half express ourselves and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.”

Mostly, though, it’s not such a conscious choice. Since most of us are born into families that have forgotten they are the self-expression of the Infinite, they unknowingly pass this misinformation on to us when we are children. We grow up believing that we are separate from our Source, separate from the Love-Intelligence which created us, and inherently inadequate. When we disregard the truth that we are beings created “in the image and likeness” we, by default, “re-create” or “re-invent” ourselves in another image…a distorted image.

We are, in essence, asleep to our inherent magnificence and have “invented” a counterfeit self to replace our authentic self. I call this counterfeit self the “shadow self.” Some refer to it as the ego, the egoic mind, the false self, or the fearful self. It’s all the same thing.

The shadow self was born from a belief that we are separate from our Source, separate from our good and separate from each other. The shadow self incorporates a belief structure which includes the assumption that we are mostly powerless, subject to the winds of fate, a victim of circumstance, alone, afraid and in need of something or someone to make us feel better.

Generation after generation has erroneously assumed that this false self is true human nature. We tend to accept, without question, that the shadow self is who we are for two reasons: a) it is what we were taught from the moment we were born, and b) society constantly reinforces this assumption. This is not the Truth of us, but we believe it is (and therefore, it will be our experience) because until we discover otherwise, it’s all we know.

For most of us, this “shadow self” has become our dominant self today, and our authentic self is only hinted at from time to time. We may catch a glimpse of it when we fall in love with someone, when we witness pure beauty in nature, when we’re in meditation, when we are in selfless service, or during moment of peak experience in work or play.

It can be said that the shadow self has served humankind by allowing us to safely maneuver our way through the confused world which we’ve invented. But the price of “keeping us safe” is that we stay small and never risk expressing our highest potential.

It is time to break free and spread our wings! It is time to awaken from the spell of the shadow self which is killing our dreams and keeping of small.

One thing is for sure…the potential to express our authentic self remains within us at every moment and each of us enters this incarnation with the longing to wake from the ego dream and once again live in the full awareness of our True self.

In the next several days, I will be continuing this discussion of the shadow self and authentic self and post step-by-step processes for reclaiming our authentic self, thereby expressing our highest potential.

Seek the Joy

When I brought my twin girls to a week-long sleep away camp last week to drop them off for a outdoor hiking and nature-bonding mega adventure, there was understandable trepidation. My daughter Olivia had been having severe anxiety and just not sleeping at night. Because of this, I wasn’t sleeping either. I began to feel like I did right after I gave birth…totally sleep deprived…dreaming while awake, and dangerously catching myself drifting off behind the wheel. It wasn’t a good situation. Needless to say there was lots of tension in the house.

So the idea that she could sleep away from home, and away from her Mama, felt like nothing but wishful thinking. The only thing that got us there at all was her excitment at the idea of all the wonderful activities that were promised…hiking, canoeing, archery, yoga, drama, guitar, rock wall climbing, crafts…all the things she loves. So we chose to focus on that.

As we were hugging goodbye and her eyes were welling up with tears, a sign on one of the cabins caught my eye. It read, “Seek the Joy.” That was the name of the cabin. Seek the Joy. I said, “Look Olivia the sign is speaking to us. It’s telling us to focus of the all the exciting and joy-filled adventures you’re going to be having here.” It seemed to make the goodbye easier.

On the way home I kept thinking about the sign. It wasn’t just for her, it was speaking to me as well. How easy it is to get wrapped up in the drama of a challenging event. But, now there was breathing room. My husband and I were free for a whole week! What joy! My mindset shifted immediately and I chose to trust everything would work out with her. I chose to focus on my joy (something that had been seriously lacking as of late.)

Not only was I focusing on finding and focusing on the joy…I was choosing to activate it. Joy is within us at all times. We’re just not usually connected to it. Life gets so serious at times. But here in this moment we can choose to connect with the joy…seek the joy and even more…amplify whatever joy might be present and celebrate it!

Try it right now. Focus on what you love about your surroundings. What’s going right in your life? What’s going right in your world? Focus on it, and then turn up the volume on it. Celebrate it! Let it expand and fill your heart, your body and your mind. Let it take over.

Keep doing this little excerise and watch what happens. You are literally creating an attractive energy that brings more good into your life.

Post script: I got caught up on my sleep and my daugher made it through camp with flying colors. And although there were a few difficult moments, she had so much fun, she didn’t want to leave! Even better, the anxiety seems to have abated…she’s sleeping like a baby again.

Their Program is Unique and Amazing

Rarely do I recommend someone else’s program that might be considered my competition, but I just can’t hold back on this one. I want to share it with everyone I know, because I am in the middle of working with it and it’s shifting energy in me that I didn’t know even needed to be shifted. I am opening up to a new level of accepting my value and accepting more prosperity into my life. It’s quite extraordinary. It’s also rare to find something that, once you’re in, offers so much more than was promised in the initial “sales letter.” This one does. It’s more than you think it is on first glance. I want everyone I care about to check out their program (that means you!). Click on this link and you’ll go to an introduction to Kristen and David Morreli’s Prosperity Tribe Program… http://bit.ly/17l1py I’m not sure they are still taking new members, but if they are…jump on it. If not, they’ve still got lots of free downloads and programs and their radio show, Everything is Energy, which is so inspiring.

Master the Manifestation Process with this Daily Tool

No doubt about it, it takes daily focused attention to move away from the mind-set of the world which is based on lack, limitation and suffering…and create a new mind-set based on a Spiritual awareness of limitless love, joy and plenty.  However, this is exactly the consciousness we must embrace in order to attract the good that we seek.  In fact, we must really deepen our understanding of the Law of Attraction principles and energetically magnetize our heart’s desire in order for it to manifest on a permanent basis.

Well, good news…I’ve been developing a daily tool for doing this more easily and more completely…and I’m just introducing it today. It’s my Daily Manifestation Tips and, for a limited time, it is free!  Simply go to www.ManifestYourGood.com and sign up for it in the opt-in box.

Imagine every day you will find, in your inbox a simple, yet potent focus tip containing a powerful idea to help you master the manifestation process.  In addition, there will be an affirmation for you to repeat throughout the day to help incorporate the idea deeply in your consciousness.

Unlike other fluffy, “feel-good” positive thoughts and motivational quotes, these manifestation tips are transformational tools that will powerfully activate the manifestation process in your life.

Again, I’m able to offer this benefit free of charge for a limited time.  (and, in just the first 12 hours several dozen individuals have already signed up!).  So, don’t wait…go and sign up now before I realize I should really be charging for this :-)

And many blessings on your journey of manifesting a magnificent life!