Showing posts with label focus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label focus. Show all posts

5 ways to create more good for ourselves - tying this stuff into our business





I think people and situations come to us to play out in front of us the energy we are carrying. We can literally look at everything in our lives as manifesting the energies we carry. 

We carry this energy through our beliefs.

Changing our beliefs is at the root of changing how things are working in our life.

This is how good stuff takes us to more good stuff and bad stuff can lead us quickly to everything falling apart.

(especially if we have spent many years and probably many lifetimes creating keyholes for the belief that creates the emotion that feels "I am not safe" - this is the real meaning of karma - the reaping what we sow and repeating what we sow labeling of a feeling

This is why affirmations work for some people but not others. Speaking positive words and writing positive words and hearing positive words changes the space we occupy. But we can move out of that space very quickly

(think about how we can be in a great mood and then someone cuts us off in traffic and we get mad, instantly - unconsciously flashing to all the other times in our life where someone has gotten ahead of us or been faster than us or something has just come out of nowhere and put us in our place)

if that space does not line up with our beliefs.

I know makers who have literally put themselves out of business by following the advice to double their prices. Not because this is bad advice (although sometimes it is) and not because there aren't customers for their new price range but because they themselves didn't line up with their new prices!

(and I am not saying that people who make and sell more expensive items have different beliefs than people who sell inexpensive items, but if the earring fits ... )

So, to create more good for ourselves we are 1. telling our stories in the best way possible, 2. focusing on how we want to feel, 3. meditating and 4. celebrating - how does this stuff look within our business?

#1. We stop comparing our work to anyone else's work - we stop comparing our business to anyone else's business. There is not a competition going on here (and we would be comparing our inside to someone else's outside anyway).

We are all here for different things (and none of us are here to make jewelry or sweaters, trust me) - we have all been through different things - we all have different ways of looking at the world.

And the world we are seeing is manifested just for us based on the energy we are carrying.

I see the world through the lens of mythology. There was no way I would have ever given my mother the satisfaction of saying I Love Jesus, but I would have felt perfectly comfortable making her perfectly uncomfortable by talking about Athena and Lilith.

Myth is social instruction. It's story that gets handed down through the generations to teach us how to be good members of the collective. So, it's about teaching people how to behave or not behave which is why although I embrace it, I am also a little suspicious of it, too ...

(I have found the archetypes based on the myths to be as real as rain though)

We don't complain about customers, ever. It is really weird to me when people go on Facebook and complain about their customers. People who do this all the time are not doing themselves any favors. They will just be attracting, through their attention to these stories, more and more of these problem customers right into their businesses.

For the rest of us, they are doing us a favor because we get to feel how much we appreciate our own customers.

All business owners see the truth of this - we have all had that problem customer situation where everything goes wrong - first something happens and we ship late, then we realize something is wrong with what we have shipped, so we email the customer to explain and we call them Shirley instead of Susan. Ouch.

Everything goes from bad to worse. 

No doubt the customer is late ordering for the birthday of someone they don't even want to shop for - this energy lines up with our distracted energy, even if we have had 100 perfect transactions that day that didn't, and we have a catastrophe in the making. Of course, if we eventually handle this situation well, that extreme energy will flip to the other extreme and the customer will become a loyal buyer for life.

The key is to be languaging any problem as a problem situation never as a problem customer.

We are not dealing with a problem customer, since there is no such thing, just a problem situation or even better a challenging situation. This way of thinking makes all the difference to the final outcome.

We tell the best stories about our business. If we can't tell good stories- we just shut up.

#2  We focus on the feel good emotions. We make a list of how we want our business to make us feel - why are we doing this thing we are doing?

Our list might include : proud, organized, responsible, independent, creative, collaborative, abundant, etc.

We read this list everyday focusing on feeling the emotion - we can just make stuff up that we need to in order to feel these emotions - studies show our brains can't tell the difference.

#3. We meditate. If we go to the post office and find - surprise, surprise - there is no line and we are in and out - close your eyes in the car and sit for 10 minutes. Waiting for our modgepodge to dry? Good time to meditate. Downloading a report, printing labels, about to make an important phone call - tell your brain "I'm not going to need you for a few minutes, my friend" and shut it down.

#4. Celebrate the good stuff - don't wait for the good stuff to happen. This is about being, not doing. Celebrate the good stuff that is coming and the good stuff we already have. Last night I celebrated my bills.

(yes, those things I used to toss on the backseat of my car and forget to pay)

I celebrated life's belief in my future earning ability. I celebrated my ability to stay open to new avenues and new ideas for abundance. I celebrated the business I have built here based on my collaboration with the companies I am now paying.

I wrote the checks with my favorite pen, used the magical new Harry Potter stamps

(yes, I request my post office order me the special stamps collectors get and then I use them)

thanked the electric company for my lights and the cable company for my beloved internet and celebrated with a vanilla soy candle and 2 episodes of Downton Abbey.

I have some astrological happening to post about - hopefully I will get that post up before the weekend. xo all

5 ways to create more good for ourselves - #2 focus on our thoughts and especially on how we want to feel


Candace Pert was a neuroscientist (she passed away a few months ago) whose amazing career included two excellent books "Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel," with Deepak Chopra and "Everything You Need to Know to Feel Good".

In the early 90's while serving as the chief molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health she made an amazing discovery that thoughts are real, physical things.

She found that every thought we have (and emotion it produces) has a unique neuropeptide associated with it. Our body produces that unique neuropeptide every time we think that particular thought and experience that particular emotion. These neuropeptides are amino acids produced by the hypothalamus (the control center) in our brain.

Every time we think a thought our hypothalamus translates the thought into billions of neuropeptides that are uniquely associated with the feeling we experience by that thought. Our bloodstream is just flooded with this stuff. 

These billions of neuropeptides join with our cells by inserting themselves into a special receptical in each cell's membrane - just like a key fitting into a lock.

Each neuropeptide receptacle on a cell's membrane is designed to fit just that one particular peptide and no other. So once that neuropeptide finds the right receptacle it gets absorbed into the cell (the cell that literally creates our physical body).

Dr. Pert discovered that over time our cells develop more and more unique receptacles based on the neuropeptides they are most frequently capturing. Our cells even begin to crave these familiar neuropeptides (the ones they have built those unique recepticals to receive). Our cells start telling our hypothalamus to produce these particular peptides because we have developed an actual physical need for them.

So, our cells are not craving stuff that feels good (meaning good thoughts and good emotions) - our cells are craving thoughts and emotions that are familiar.

This gives the need for us to "focus on the feelings we want to have" a whole other impetus. It also helps to explain how focusing on how we want to feel rather than focusing on what we want to get actually works.

(also the law of attraction which is much, much bigger than The Secret and operates more like a tuning fork with like attracting like)

Focusing on a goal always brings up resistant thoughts - Why aren't I there yet? Why don't I have that yet? Why does she have that and I don't? What if I don't get it? What if this never happens for me? This is the "what we resist persists" problem with attracting what we want.

Focusing on a goal also requires us to actually have a goal in the first place which means we have to know what we want which is the place we might get stuck because we often don't know what we want in the first place.

Luckily, we don't have to know what we want. We only have to know how we want to feel and all of us, every single one of us already knows that. We just have to get our hypothalamus to start creating the right neuropeptides and our cells to start producing the right keyholes!

Now our cells may have had decades creating all these keyholes for chaos and shame and fear and guilt and grief, but we can start building new keyholes today - right this minute. We can start focusing on how we want to feel (regardless of what is happening in our lives) today.

How might this work? Well, let's say we have a goal of making more money, but we can't really see how we can do this or what this would actually look like. So, we don't worry about that part (worry thoughts will just produce worry keyholes in our cells and we will literally become made of worry).

If we want to attract more money we think about the feelings that extra money would bring us which could be : safety or freedom or joy or peace or being loved or cherished or attention (which I've heard is the number one thing women want from men) or appreciation (which I've heard is the number one thing men want from women) or some other thing or all of these things.

We make a list of the emotions we want to feel.

(always write lists out by hand and use script since there is more energy in our physical makings and more fluid movement with script writing - I have heard some schools are no longer teaching script - maybe they have forgotten we all need to be able to sign our names and our unique signatures come from writing script letters a hundred, gazillion times)

We spend time each day with this list feeling each emotion. 

We think about things we have experienced before or we just make stuff up - our body doesn't know the difference. We just feel what it feels like to be secure - to have enough money that we can take care of everything we need to take care of easily. We feel what it feels like to be happy and joyful. We dance around our studios and bedrooms and kitchens. We breathe deeply from our bellies with this stuff.

We also notice when we feel these emotions throughout the day (and we will start feeling them more and more) and we savor them.We don't wait for something to happen to feel a good emotion, we just feel them for no outside reason at all.

(think about that Meg Ryan diner scene in When Harry Met Sally, you know the one I mean, we need to really savor these emotions that we want to feel - other people will just want some of what we are having)

When we notice a negative thought coming in - we catch it before it produces the negative emotion. We let that thought go - we replace it with another thought - one that produces the emotion we want to build keyholes for-

the kind of emotion we want to feed our body; the kind of emotion we want our bodies, and lives, to be created from; the kind of emotion we want to attract more of.

(yes, I'm dangling participles all over the place - ignore this)

Now, again this isn't about pouring pink paint over our problems and pretending they don't exist (as Marianne Williamson says) - sometimes we are going to get mad or feel overwhelmed or sad or scared - once the thought has brought on the emotion, we let our bodies feel it, then we let it go - breath it out with a pulse breath.

We move on to a better thought and an emotion we want to have. We let our bodies chow down on that.

I turned my entire life around very quickly many years ago with just this step and meditation. I have gotten out of practice but am back on the wagon .. will report on what develops.

next up part #3 necessary stillness