The Miracle Way

(If you would like more information about personal life coaching, or would like a free introductory session, please contact me:  kathy@kathyjacobson.com)

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Law of Attraction.  It’s been going around for a long while, with such catch phrases as:  “Thought precedes action.”  “You are what you think about.”  “Anything the human mind can perceive it can achieve.”

Almost everything I’ve ever read about this law considers thoughts to be the magnetic force.  The more focused the thought, the more magnetic power it has.  If you think about money (or health, or love, or happiness), and you give it your full attention, it will come to you.

Philosophically, I accept this principle.  But in my experience, thoughts are only a part of the power.  Actions and emotions are equally necessary.  You must bring thoughts, actions and emotions into congruence, and any misalignment can skew the result.

Aligning the Law of Attraction

Say, for instance, you want to loose weight.  You know the key actions – eat better and exercise more.  In addition to acting appropriately to your goal, you decide to think yourself thin.  So you put together an affirmation, “I am thin, healthy and at my ideal weight.”  And you repeat this affirmation all the time:  when you’re building a healthy salad for lunch, when you’re jogging on the treadmill, when you’re walking toward the mall from the far distant corner of the parking lot, when you’re taking a shower.

So far, so good.  You’re solid with two pieces of the formula – but your ideal weight stays stubbornly out of reach.  Time to bring in supporting emotions.  Love is probably the strongest healing energy, so you decide to love your body, love your thinness, love yourself as a thin person.  You also decide to enthusiastically enjoy being your ideal weight.  With this inclusion of supporting emotional energy, you might find the weight peeling away.

Or you might not.  And if not, you’re blocking it.  The block might be an action – perhaps you’re still taking in more calories than you’re burning.  It might be an emotion – perhaps you’re impatient, investing in expectation, comparing yourself to others, or holding some other kind of judgment.  Or it might be a thought.  Affirmations in and of themselves are not magic.  Just repeating what you want to be might not get you where you want to go.  If you carry a belief that contradicts what you want, you may be investing as much in the Law of Detraction as in the Law of Attraction.

Beliefs are extremely powerful.  They’re like fences, like boxes.  They hold you in, they limit your progress, they establish boundaries beyond which you cannot go.  To break past them, you must dismantle them.

An exercise I find both helpful and powerful is to write out your intention statement or affirmation, use the word “but” as a conjunction, and create a compound sentence with whatever comes up after the “but.”  For example, “I am thin, healthy and at my ideal weight, but keeping weight off has always been a struggle for me.”  Repeat at least ten times, letting other fears, objections, past experiences, and beliefs come to the surface:  “I am thin, healthy and at my ideal weight, but I can’t resist dessert.”  “I am thin, healthy and at my ideal weight, but when I was young and tiny I felt insignificant.”  “I am thin, healthy and at my ideal weight, but it won’t last.”

Once you have your list of “buts,” sort them and start to dissolve them.  Most such barriers fall into one of three categories.

• Some reflect the present, your current situation.  Reframe those and use new affirmations to embed a new belief in your subconscious:  “I am thin, healthy and at my ideal weight, and thin is my new reality.  I am and I will be.”  “I am thin, healthy and at my ideal weight, and I easily resist dessert – even Key Lime Pie.”
• Some are rooted in the past, old experiences or deeply-rooted beliefs about yourself.  For those, explore the story that supports the belief:  Were you insignificant?  Was your thin stature the reason?  Use logic to help you disengage from a story that probably had no basis to begin with.  For increased power, extend love and compassion to the child or adolescent you used to be, who adopted those beliefs.  Again, a new affirmation can strengthen your revised thinking.  “I am thin, healthy and at my ideal weight, and I add significant value in every situation.”
• Some project into the future.  For those, identify the strongest emotional energy that will help you create the future to your liking.  Any partner or creator emotions will support and sustain future results.  Consider the creative power of something such as, “With delight and trust, I celebrate my idea weight every day.

Recognizing the time zone of your “buts” will help you identify the most effective ways to dissolve them.

The above suggestions are starting points.  Sometimes the first removal exercises work like magic.  Sometimes, however, other forces interfere with The Law of Attraction at a deeper level.

The Law of Detraction

The comparison of The Law of Attraction with magnetism works beautifully if you think of your desire as a magnet and what you want as iron filings.  Just increase the intensity of your desire, and you will pull more “filings” toward you.  But if what you want is another “magnet” you’ll run into the properties of polarization.

Consider magnets:  Each has a positive and a negative pole.  The only way two can connect is through opposite poles.  If they both present the same polarity, they repel each other.

In metaphysical terms this could be called The Law of Detraction:  Misaligned energies repel each other.  You have to be appropriately aligned with what you want in order to attract it.  Otherwise, your energy and the energy of what you want repel each other.  What you want must be as eager to connect with you as you are eager to connect with it.

It’s been my observation that in most cases what you want wants you.  (When what you want is human, however, that person brings a full range of human complexities into the equation so attraction is also more complex.)  If you want money, money wants you.  If you want health, health wants you.  If you want peace, peace wants you.  Very simple.

If you aren’t attracting what you want, if it isn’t responding eagerly and positively to your “attraction,” you can safely assume something is out of alignment.  Since you are the chooser, since you are the person with free agency, you alone have the potential to find the misalignment and repair in.

The Law of Detraction kicks into action any time you operate from Interpreter mode.  Every judgmental emotion interferes with attraction.  Every thought, belief, assumption, expectation or story that mires you in struggle or limitation disrupts the polarity of your energy.  Every action that doesn’t support what you want deters the positive action you desire.  This detraction  occurs whether you are the generator of the disruptive energy, or whether you assign the interference to your intention.

For example, Shelley* wanted to switch jobs to one that’s truer for her.  She set the following intention:  “With enthusiasm and joy, I relish my new job.  What I bring to my work is accepted and respected by others.”  She practiced generating feelings of enthusiasm and joy from within.  She’d worked through layers of uncertainty about the economy and her competition and her own ability to perform at higher levels.  She sent out a bunch of resumes and responded to some ads, and for weeks nothing moved.  One day, in frustration, she said, “What more can I do?  Maybe my ideal job doesn’t exist.”

I suggested we take a closer look at her perception of what was going on.  Did the job not exist?  Or did she believe, it didn’t exist?  She realized she’d never worked at a job she truly enjoyed.  She always made do, took whatever came along, settled.  I asked her to consider whether she would emit different energy if she unconditionally believed this idea job existed –  instead of believing it didn’t.  Since she had done her own inner work on this (when she affirmed enthusiasm and joy, it was real), I invited her to shift the focus of her intention statement from her own energy to the energy of the job:  “My idea job exists and it wants me.  It welcomes me, and we do beautiful work together.”  Within a week she had an interview, and a week later she had a job offer.

Here’s a set of simple questions to assess whether you’ve got Attraction or Detraction most at work with one of your intentions:

• Are you getting what you want?  (Is your intention clearly stated?  It is true for you?)
• Have you aligned your own thoughts, actions and emotions and thereby dismantled any barriers?
• Are you giving your intention sufficient attention by reinforcing your aligned thoughts, actions and emotions?  (In other words, are you sticking with the program?)

If you answer yes to these three questions and what you want is still not opening up for you, take a serious look at your energetic relationship with what you want:

• Accept that the object of your intention wants you as much as you want it.
• Convey to the object of your intention that you want to be equal partners.
• Ask it what it wants from you.
• Do your best to provide what it wants.
• Receive its best in return.

Edward* is doing this with his violin.  To Edward, the first two steps were already givens.  Then he asked his violin what it wanted from him, and it suddenly occurred to him to disregard his chin rest.  So he did, and removing that physical barrier between his body and the violin immediately changed his relationship with his instrument.  Since then he’s connecting with his violin more as a partner than a possession, and his musicianship has moved to a whole new level.

When you accept what you want as a partner at this energetic level, I suspect you will experience The Law of Attraction in surprising new ways.
*  Not their real names

Tags: Creating, creation, Intention, personal power

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 24th, 2010 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Making Miracles, The Law of Attraction, Uncategorized, intentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.