Do You Provide the Consciousness?

This morning I was feeling low—apathetic even. I knew I needed something to lift me out of this funk I was in. And, something did.

I reached for my copy of The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes and found this:

“We do not create. We use the Power of the One Mind, which creates for us. Law of life is a law of thought—an activity of consciousness—the Power flows through us. The Spirit can do for us only what It can do through us. Unless we are able to provide the consciousness, It cannot make the gift.”

What a powerful truth that last line is! It’s also one I know and one I can so easily forget when I slip into identifying more with effects I don’t like than how I caused them…especially when I don’t manage my thoughts as I should.

Then I listened to a recorded program given by Ann Taylor. She’s known as a healer for some of the big names in the motivational and metaphysical genres. I borrowed from what she did—she does an unusual kind of prayer on these calls and for her clients—and created my own.

I’d like to share mine with you, and I invite you to repeat it out loud to yourself each morning—or write your own and repeat it out loud each morning.

“Thank you, Creator, for imprinting my DNA and my conscious and subconscious mind with the Truth of creative energy and laws, and the faith to live them every day.
Thank you, Creator, for imprinting my DNA and my conscious and subconscious mind, going back seven generations, with the Truth of creative energy and laws, and the faith to live them every day.
Thank you, Creator, for removing any lack of faith in the Truth of creative energy and laws from my DNA and my conscious and subconscious mind, going back seven generations of my lineage, so that I live the Truth, in faith, every day.
Thank you, Creator.”

Challenges happen. But when they do, we have to remember what Holmes wrote: “The Spirit can do for us only what It can do through us. Unless we are able to provide the consciousness, It cannot make the gift.”

Practice makes progress.

Does Your Subconscious Insist That You Resist?

Resistance is an automatic reaction to undesirables in your life. Resistance may seem natural, even right, but some instances of resistance cost you big-time.

Resistance creates more things to resist. It creates a constant stream of negative thoughts that lead to negative feelings expressed verbally, physically, or internally through health imbalances and uninspired life experiences.

Look at anything you resist in your life: status of relationships, finances, career, etc. If your desire is strong for anything to NOT be what it is, you are in Resistance. No matter what you do or say about it, this resistance will cause what you do not want anymore of to continue and possibly expand.

Note: You have a right and responsibility to NOT engage with anything or anyone you know you are better off without (negative people, news, events, etc.) when you can choose otherwise. And, as challenging as it may seem, you really can choose what you feel and therefore think, say, and do.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." — Richard Buckminster Fuller

You can choose to release your insistence that something or someone in your life be different (insistence really does not work) and take action(s) required in and for your best interest, without being tense (tension does not shift anything). Doing this is a way to get your subconscious programming aligned with your conscious choices and actions.

One big resistance that may challenge you is to NOT include or allow any past experiences in the NOW. This is a challenge because your subconscious will play back tapes of previous struggles and will do this with lots of detailed images. This causes you to recall, focus on, and feel specific past struggles, as though they are happening in this moment. They are not. You may have present-moment matters to address, but past ones are over. They only affect the moment you’re in now if you allow them to.

As long as you believe those old tapes are your current reality—or react to them as though they are, you resist any positive present-moment shifts: “I HAVE to fear and feel THIS because I once (or more often) experienced THAT.” This approach blocks your good, and serenity, from coming to you. Your release of resistance gives the Universe permission to deliver your good; it allows serenity in.

You learned certain aspects of resistance from others who learned them as well. It is the tape your subconscious plays in its belief that this will help you survive. Your subconscious focuses on what helps you survive; your conscious mind focuses on what helps you thrive. You want them to work as a team, which means you have to NOT listen to old, negative tapes when they run. You want to create new tapes and run THEM.

Ernest Holmes wrote: “Healing, then, is accomplished by uncovering, neutralizing and erasing false images of thought, and letting the perfect idea reflect itself through subjective mind into the body. When one realizes that everything is Mind and that nothing moves but Mind . . . he will see that nothing can permanently heal unless it be accompanied by right thinking.” Healing can refer to anything in your self or your life or your business that you feel is not whole, healthy, joyful, and fulfilling.

Pay attention to when and how often you run such tapes and put right thinking into practice until it becomes natural to you, whatever time that takes. Practice self-observance rather than self-judgment as you move through this process. Self-judgment is a form of resistance. Practice makes progress.

Release the belief that you will (eventually) never repeat old patterns. Maybe that will happen and maybe it will not. Belief that you must never repeat them is . . . Resistance. It is more important you observe when you resist so you can consciously choose to embrace what you really want rather than emotionally engage what you don’t want.

You are what you practice.
© Joyce Shafer

How Well Do You Manage When Your Routine Changes?

Small and not-so-small changes in your routine can create either a speed bump or a bumpy road effect on your life. What do you do when that happens?

Quite a number of people I know experienced major life changes just before 2011, and after the year began. Were you one of them? Significant shifts and lesser ones create something in common: a change in routine of greater or lesser degree.

Often, we struggle a bit (or a lot) with even one small or moderate change to our routine. We become used to or complacent about our routines, even ones we are not necessarily happy about, or ones that may even cause us to feel miserable about ourselves or our lives.

Routines FEEL easier because they are familiar. They can be followed practically by rote, like how an experienced driver vs. a new one focuses on the act of driving and doing other things at the same time. Some routines help us stay organized and on time. Some prevent spontaneity in our days and lives, cause us to be inflexible. Some create negative or unpleasant outcomes.

Routines are why New Year’s resolutions are forgotten, or if not forgotten, not fulfilled. Sticking with even one change to a routine can feel difficult, even if it is desired. It can take a while before the new behavior feels and is as automatic as the old one was. It takes persistence and consistency to arrive at this point.

My relocation move and temporary dwelling eliminated nearly all of my routines. Unlike vacations or family visits where your routine being temporarily interrupted is a welcome change (hopefully), I had to accept and allow there was no return “home,” no return to most of what was familiar ahead of me. I’m fortunate that my arrangements were as favorable as they were. Others have had to start over after significant, devastating losses. My understanding of what that must be like for them has deepened.

The metaphysical or spiritual community often mentions surrender. When significant change occurs, how well you manage becomes a matter of how well you surrender your resistance to what now is, and go forward from there. It is a matter of surrender or suffer if you insist on resisting.

I realized the best approach for me was to surrender to the fact that so much of what was familiar and routine no longer existed; to observe what creates frustration and to look at that with self-honesty; and to notice which changes actually improve or enhance my daily and personal experiences. This requires self-honesty as well. It could be so easy to return to many of my previous routines (or reject new ones; temporary or not); and some of that, frankly, could easily block positive opportunities and desired outcomes from coming to me.

I pay attention to how much of my former routine should be included as I move forward, and how much of whom I’ve believed myself to be, as a result of my former routine, needs to be kept or discarded. It’s important I be true to my nature; but I need to be clear what the differences are between my true nature and my programmed beliefs or habitual routines. Keeping this in mind is helping me to manage myself through this transformative time. I also watch the stories I tell myself and use tools that I know work, to help me adjust my attitude and perceptions so that I open to desired opportunities and experiences.

Whether or not you are going through a change in your routine at this time, how you manage yourself through such a time is worthy of a few moments of your consideration. It can make the difference between being in flow or being stuck in resistance.

You are what you practice.
© Joyce Shafer

Do You Yell at the Movie Screen of Your Life?

If you find you don’t like a movie, you don’t yell at the screen to change. But, is that what you do about your life?

I’d decided to use the Ho’oponopono method to work on old program tapes that run in my subconscious. If you’re going to aim at a target so you can hit it consistently, you need to practice and more than just a few times.

This can be uncomfortable because it means you have to face some unpleasant situations and treat them as the practice opportunities they are. You see, increasing consciousness isn’t so much about adding something as much as it is subtracting something. It’s about letting go of what holds you back. What usually holds you back is that you don’t see that what you’re doing holds you back.

A practice opportunity came when I spent two hours visiting with someone who complained the entire time. It was a non-stop negative stream of past hurts and how this person did that or didn’t do this. Nothing I offered made a difference. In fact, my efforts seem to amplify the situation.

During the two hours, I struggled with the Ho’oponopono technique, but kept repeating: I’m sorry, Divine, for whatever is in me that created this. Please forgive me for the image I hold of this person and of myself. Thank you for helping me to heal these images and for transmuting them into love. I love you and trust you to assist me with this for the highest good of all involved.

For the rest of that day and the next two days, every time I caught myself replaying that visit in my mind or memories of similar conversations, or complained to myself about the person, I’d stop and do the four statements in abbreviated form: I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

It was genuinely astonishing to see how often I had to stop myself and repeat the four statements. I’d do this, and within seconds more tapes would start to run. After a while I said aloud, “Oh my God! I’m doing exactly what that person does.” The reflection wasn’t pretty.

It became clear that I was a projector running a film in my mind about the person. I cannot change the screen the film plays on, though that’s what I attempted during the visit; but I can deliberately decide not to play the film, especially over and over… and over.

All of this took real effort on my part. It took willingness to understand my part in all of it and a sincere desire to see what I was doing so I could do something else.

Think of some of your own challenges. What films are you projecting? Are they of struggle; ones that say you’re undeserving, unlovable, that life has to be difficult or that certain people have to be difficult? How often would you have to play these films before what you see on the screen is what you prefer to see? Right. It will never happen, if that’s how you address this.

You have to run better films if you want to see better images on the screen. You have to stop expecting the screen to change. This may not be easy. What is easier is to yell at or about the screen. It’s painful but easier than owning that we see the films we run.

Create and run films you prefer, even if you continue to modify them to improve them. Allow that it may (or may not) take a while for your projected image to get into focus and run smoothly on the screen. Watch that you don’t run a new film once then complain that this doesn’t work. Consider how often you run the negative ones and the results. This alone is evidence that it does work. Practice the same consistency with running better films as you have negative ones.

You are what you practice.
© Joyce Shafer

What Does Your Happiness Depend On?

If someone told you that you could be unconditionally happy, you would do whatever this took. Or, would you?

In Anthony De Mello’s book, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality, he wrote that it is challenging to be unconditionally happy because we fight it. Why do we fight it? We have expectations, some of which are realistic and some of which are not.

To be unconditionally happy (or even just happy most of the time), you have to let go of your dearly-held (or addiction to) expectations. That is not necessarily easy to do. Perhaps, without realizing it, you have, as De Mello wrote, a thought (belief) like, “You are my happiness. If I don’t get you, I refuse to be happy.”

That segment, “If I don’t get you,” is the clincher because the word YOU can represent anything. Think of what (or who) it is you desire and use the word or words in front of the word You that starts the quote. Example: (Wealth, love, success, power, control, etc.), you are my happiness. If I don’t get you, I refuse to be happy.”

It basically comes down to saying if you do not get what you want, expect, or demand, you REFUSE to be happy. You refuse to experience happiness amid What Is.

De Mello added that what we fight, we empower; that is, you give what you resist as much power as you use to fight it. And, you wonder why it does not shift; wonder why it or they do not change, rather than focus on changing yourself.

If you continue to consider anyone or anything the enemy or adversary, can you really expect your relationship with it (money, health, weight, life) or them to be anything other than an ongoing battle? You can do what you need to, to look after or protect yourself AND stop engaging the “enemy” in a fight.

When you resist What Is and insist it or they be the way you want, you bind yourself, in a negative way, to the lack of what you desire or demand, as though you put heavy shackles on your ankles. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you drag this weight, this result of your Insistence on Resistance, with you.

You can spring the lock on such shackles with a choice to let go of your attachment to this way of thinking and behaving, and pay attention to what YOU think, feel, say, and do that causes you to refuse to be happy until or unless what you are convinced must happen happens.

You behave this way because you were programmed to do so, because that was and still is the prevalent example all around you. It is the syndrome you have seen before, “I will be happy when…,” that keeps you miserable. You stay miserable because you continue to demand others and your material reality change rather than empower yourself to understand how reality truly operates, and then practice this.

When you let go of resistance and observe yourself, others, and the smaller and bigger picture, What Is shifts, and often without any more effort than what is described here. You often call this witnessing a miracle. This is a universal law: what you give you get more of. Give resistance, you get more to resist. Give fear, you get more to fear. Give trust to the universe in all things, you get more evidence of why that works.

You have been brainwashed to believe you have to control or take control of your reality, when what is required is for you to recognize you are in a synergistic relationship with reality.

De Mello wrote, “Come home to yourself. Observe yourself. That’s why I said earlier that self-observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing. After a while you don’t have to make any effort, because, as illusions begin to crumble, you begin to know things that cannot be described. It’s called happiness. Everything changes and you become addicted to awareness.”

When you choose awareness over illusion, stress and strain diffuse, as will anger. The path to happiness requires you challenge your entire belief system . . . to seek the CURE, which may or may not be painful, rather than just relief from the painful result of your illusions.

You can call it Law of Attraction or call it common sense; what you call Awareness does not matter. That you call it into your life and way of being does matter.

You are what you practice.
© Joyce Shafer

How Can Judgment Serve Us?

If you have ever attempted to shift from judgment to non-judgment, you may have found that challenging. It is because something important was missing.

There are two types of judgment: self-judgment and judgment of everything and everyone else. Judgment can serve us, if we know how to let it.

Judgment, in regard to laws, rules, and regulations, is in place in an effort to restore balance when an action creates too great a contrast; that is, exceeds an acceptable level of contrast and impacts others in a negative way or has the potential to do so. Nearly seven billion people on the planet have been exposed to different cultures and beliefs, as well as have unique personalities, so will, understandably, find it a challenge to behave as a homogenous society. Contrasts will happen.

The important missing aspect is that judgment of the self, others, or a situation is like a neon sign flashing the words “Contrast Exists Here” and, what that actually means for us. Whenever anything contrasts with our perception of how we, another, or a situation “should” be, we turn to our familiar “friend,” judgment. Being in a judgmental state about others or situations, lets us believe we are what we deeply want to feel: that we are in the right. We fear being in the wrong or incorrect.

In past writings I said it is important to release self-judgment. My thinking has shifted about this for a specific reason: it is a worthy goal, but there is a step that needs to be taken to get there. Plus, non-judgment may not mean what you think it does (keep reading for a different definition). When self-judgment is triggered, it alerts us to the fact that something we believe about ourselves needs exploration, that a truth or personal truth waits for us to discover it and understand how it fits, or doesn’t, into our PERCEPTION of reality, including how we perceive ourselves.

The next time you feel judgmental about yourself, another, or a situation, ask what the contrast is that you feel. Let the contrast reveal an important message to you. That is its purpose.

Contrasts can assist you to discern a perception vs. a truth or personal truth. Consider the not-enough-information syndrome. Have you ever jumped to an assumption and believed you were looking at the whole truth, only to discover or realize later that you were not? “Do I have enough information to justify my judgment” is a question you might write down and put where you can easily see it.

Anthony De Mello wrote in his book, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality, that we do not like to admit we are not always right. When we discover we are wrong, or know we are, it is uncomfortable because we (and others) hold a judgment that it is a form of failure to be wrong or incorrect, rather than a part of life and learning and growing. Contrasts are opportunities to expand our awareness.

So, I now modify my statement to release self-judgment and suggest you practice easing up about judging that you judge. Also ease up on your attachment to how you believe self-judgment is “supposed” to be experienced and processed. Allow any form of judgment you feel to communicate what it wants you to discover about YOU.

It is tempting (and programmed in us) to believe contrasts are about others or situations, and that the solution or resolution is for “them” to change. Action taken because of this belief is like nailing your shoe to the floor and turning in circles: you go nowhere and you repetitively cover the same ground, deepening the rut you are in as you go. You keep your focus on the shoe and miss the fact that you are the one keeping your foot in it, and that only you can remove your foot (discover and understand the message for you and about you in the contrast) from the shoe (the contrast, which is a manifested reflection of what is going on inside of you).

See if this different definition of non-judgment resonates for you: no old programs, tapes, or memories running. How do you do this? Ihaleakala Hew Len of Ho’oponopono fame and co-author of the book, Zero Limits, wrote, “Peace begins with me. My problems are memories replaying in my subconscious.” Think about this and see where it leads you; see what it reveals to you and for you. Dr. Hew Len describes how to do this in the book, if you are intrigued enough to learn more.

You are what you practice.
© Joyce Shafer

Is Your Focus on the Target or the Prize?

The article title asks an important question. The one you focus on has everything to do with not only your outcome but your experience reaching it.

In his book, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality, Anthony De Mello quotes Chinese sage Tranxu: “When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills; when he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous; when he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares! He thinks more of winning than of shooting, and the need to win drains him of power.”

This is a conundrum for many, though its presence usually escapes our awareness. This can happen in a variety of ways. Here are two examples.

Money

Say you feel a financial pinch (or not) and decide to offer a product, service, or workshop. Maybe it is something you already created or you create something new. The Prize is how much money you might get; perhaps, even recognition and referrals. Your Target is to provide something that solves a problem for people or enhances their lives. Re-read Tranxu’s words and think about how this might affect your energy, attitude, actions, and ultimate results in such a situation.

Are you relaxed and confident about using your skills, talents, or knowledge to assist others, with serving them as one motivator and growing yourself as another? If so, whatever your initial results are, they will expand. You will expand.

If your eyes (emotional energies) are on the prize, you will contract instead of expand. Your potential clients or customers will contract away from you, and so will your desired results. You will focus on aspects that lead you away from your true path.

Let go of any tendency to compare yourself and your desired results to others and their results, as this is another form of Eyes on the Prize.

Relationships

Consider the difference between having your target be a loving, joyful relationship with your right partner, and allowing that to arrive and unfold in your life vs. considering a specific individual as your prize. How will you think, feel, speak, and act in the first scenario vs. the second? Which scenario is imbued with ease and which with emotional upset and drama?

You could say a true target leads to expansion of your inner knowing and larger awareness. This type of focus results in not just some or many sought-after prizes coming to you, but inner and outer gifts from the Universe arrive, as well. These gifts are not rewards; they are results of Cause and Effect, according to the laws of the spiritual universe.

If your target is to BE more, which causes you to offer and contribute more, you will focus on what helps you create this. Results will come to you because this is how IT works.

You can certainly be aware your desired prize is out there and still put your primary focus on your true target. If your focus is primarily on the prize, you can bet you will experience one or more of these: worry, anxiety, jealousy, lack of confidence (or arrogance), overwork, loss of energy, depression, loss of sleep, money fears, harsh self-judgment, and the list goes on. Your results will be less than desired or none, because this is also according to the laws of the spiritual universe.

This Target or Prize focus can be applied to anything in your life. It is a good question to ask whenever you feel any emotions other than serenity, confidence, or happiness. But, it is also important to identify your True Target, which is always an inner one. Inner always creates outer. Outer always reflects inner.

You are what you practice.
© Joyce Shafer

You are welcome to use this article in your newsletter or on your blog/website as long as you use my complete bio with it.

Joyce Shafer (jls1422@yahoo.com), You Are More! Empowerment Coach, author of I Don’t Want to be Your Guru, but I Have Something to Say & other books/ebooks (Lulu.com). Benefit from empowering articles & Extras, and learn how Your Personality Blueprint can clear obstacles from your life, in her free weekly newsletter at http://stateofappreciation.webs.com