MANIFESTING MONEY: A PERSONAL EXAMPLE

Good day and I hope you are having a great day. From time to time I would like to give concrete proof, and examples of manifestations that happen, especially to me personally through the use of The Law of Attraction.  I do not do this from a stand point of ego or for any pat on the back, but rather to let you know that if it can happen to me, it can also work for you.  When it comes to The Law of Attraction (LOA) I am still a novice. I have not had the 10,000 hours of work with the concept to be called an expert by any means. I was introduced to the concept shortly before the birth of my first child in 2008. I was a skeptic for most of that year. Slowly I started to play and investigate it, so I would say I took off running around 2010 when I started this blog.

Here is the example that happened to me recently. For about a year or so my daughter has been asking me to go to Lego Land. Previously we had annual passes to Disneyland, and even though Lego Land is much closer to us, we just happened to go to Disneyland mainly because her cousins also had passes and we could spend a family day together there. When the question came to purchase an annual ticket to Lego Land or not, my wife and I were taking the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University. When I was going through the budgeting process I brought up the topic in our group discussion and pretty much unanimously it was agreed that I could just as easily drive a few more miles down the road and end up at a free beach where my kids could just play and soak up the sun as opposed to pay $199 per adult and $164 per child for annual passes. Needless to say we never budgeted for it.

I want to point out here that Financial Peace University was a fantastic program. I have taken it with my wife and also through work I have taken Core Financial Freedom course by Dave Ramsey. The issue that I want to point your attention to is HOW I WAS FEELING ABOUT THE SUBJECT OF BUDGETING.  Where I was coming from, when doing the budgeting at the time was from a place of scarcity. That is the reason it felt so negative every time my wife and I did our homework for the courses.  Here I was preaching The LOA and then I would be confronted with what really spun me away from my positive compass. I looked at the budgeting as “WIN-LOOSE” thing. If we go to Lego Land, then we cannot have something else. That was insane for someone who has been working with, let alone teaching The Law of Attraction. What would have been more productive is to see the budgeting skills and tools as a way to increase our financial knowledge and see it as a way to help us handle our money better as we become more and more prosperous.  We know that with more wealth comes more responsibility and it was a great way to train ourselves to keep track of our money now, so as we get more, we can handle it. A tool to be more prosperous, not a tool to put us into the scarcity mode of thinking.

Anyway, as it turned out last weekend, I just had an epiphany. My wife and I were thinking of what to do for the long weekend of MLK holiday, and she mentioned “let’s go to Lego Land”. I have to admit, for just a split second I hesitated and then something great happened. I said to myself, “what am I thinking? What would a deco-millionaire do in my situation?” You guessed it. We packed up our stuff and headed to Lego Land. I had no issues at all. Each adult ticket for the day was $84 and each child was around $64 or something like that. Well the funny thing is that after way paid our $15 parking and was heading down the side walk towards the entrance, a lady stopped me and asked me if I knew there was 5 star Hilton property under construction around the corner. I said no. She said if you want to tour the property I would give you a $100 Lego Land gift certificate. I am a Hilton Honor member and use their properties almost exclusively when I travel, so I said ok. She then shuffled through a magazine she had and gave me coupons for free Child admission to Lego Land with the purchase of adult tickets. She also told me to make sure to tell them I am a AAA member as there are other discounts for that.  So when we got to the ticket counter the four of us got in for around $54 as opposed to the almost $296.

We had a great time and when we were leaving I went to the membership and upgraded our one day tickets to annual pass, and saved around $250. They even refunded my $15 parking for the day. They needed the receipt for the parking refund, and my wife had “conveniently” forgotten to put the receipt on the dash of the car as we parked. Amazing. I could not have planned it any better.  How was it that I went through the entrance gate that was closest to the passenger window, so my wife would have received the receipt and not I?  So she puts it in her purse and not on the dash? I have no idea how all the discounts and the $100 gift card ended up saving me $250, but I was not complaining. Needless to say we will be visiting Lego Land allot this year and the kids are going to love the water park in the summer. Being 10 miles away from the place, I love it since I don’t have to drive 40 minutes to Disneyland.

It really does not matter the amount of money that was manifested here. It is all in the feeling I had. I was going to have a great day with my family. I also wanted to “act” like a millionaire would have. A millionaire would not have hesitated to get an annual pass for his family to enjoy time off.  It is all about feeling good. The rest just happen to work themselves out.  It is important to note I was happy to just go for one day and enjoy it. I was completely detached form the annual pass stuff. At the time I just wanted to enjoy the day with my wife and kids. I think that has allot to do with it. If I had been stressing about the price of the annual pass and all that again I would have been coming from the place of scarcity. Then no one would have had a good time.

I hope this post was useful and you understand how important your feelings are when it comes to manifesting using The Law of Attraction. Be grateful, and reach for better feelings. Concentrate on what you want and then take action on the opportunities that present themselves. Share this post with anyone who can benefit from it, and as always post your comments and thought on my Facebook Page and Twitter Feed. Till next week, to your success.

THOUGHTS OR FEELINGS... HEAD OR HEART

Good day and I hope you are having a good day. Today's post is about a simple difference that creates a stumbling block when you attempt to use The Law of Attraction.  That is the question of head or heart.  Should you think it or feel it? How do you know what is the best way to proceed? If it is both, when do you jump from one to the other, or do you even jump from one to the other?

Let's break down these questions and work our way through them utilizing what we know about The Law of Attraction (LOA). If you are new to this blog you may benefit  from reading the  basic posts about LOA from the links on the lower right hand side of this page and familiarize yourself with the basics.  You will gain more from this post if you know what LOA is, and the basics of how to use it properly.  

To simplify, LOA is a universal law, much like gravity, or electricity and ignorance of it does not mean that we are not affected by it. Conversely  the more you know about it the more you can benefit from using it.  To utilize this magnificent law you need both your head and your heart.  When there is a feeling that you want something, you are creating a desire. There is an imbalance, vibrationally, between where you are and where you want to be.  This is great, because as  humans we are endowed with the GIFT, yes I really mean gift of ever  wanting more.  Do  not let yourself be lead to thinking this is bad, or wrong, or selfish.  It is  no such a thing.  It is your birthright.  To that point, your thoughts clarify your visions, and clarity is essential to coming into harmony with what you desire. Much like taking a trip, if you have no clear idea of where you are going, it is doubtful that you will get to your destination in any reasonable time.  

Conscious thought however, can also be a detriment to the use of The Law of Attraction.  We have somewhere around 60,000 thoughts per day, and not all of them are productive.  It is widely believed in the self-help circles that 95% of the doubts, or negative thoughts that we  associate with anything will never matterialize.  Therefor our conscious thought can be a very powerful tool as well as a very devastating hinderance. Considering how most of the information that  you are faced with through out the day is negative, you have to make a concerted effort to feed your mind positivity.  One of the tenet of LOA is that what you concentrate on will be attracted to you. A key differentiating point here is that universal laws do not recognize words of negation.  In other words if you are constantly thinking about "NOT being in traffic" you WILL attract more opportunities to think about not being in traffic or said another way you will put yourself in situation where you are stuck in traffic. 

Now lets consider the heart. Even though we clarify our intention with our thoughts we give it power with the emotional charge we feel about that thought.  In my book "Road Map To Life: A Real World Lesson", I use the analogy of a steering wheel being the thought and what connects the steering wheel to the actual tiers of the car, the emotion. Another words thoughts without the emotion are worthless. I can chant 1000 times that "I am properous, and a millionaire" but if my gut feeling is saying "bull shit", I will be attracting the scarcity and the BS and not the  prosperity.  This is a  major reason many teachers, if not all of them, prescribe using gratitude for what you currently have. Desires are good, but it is important to monitor the feeling associated with those desires.  If your desire is coming from a feeling of longing, or envy, you are resonating with the vibrational forces of scarcity. In this situation you will be attracting exactly that, scarcity.  Having gratitude for where you are currently will signal the universe to bring you more opportunities to be grateful. It cannot be said any more simply.  

Do you now realize that when you envy others, or seek to compete, or entertain greed, you are coming from a place of scarcity?  This world is full of abundance.  You are meant to be abundant.  The only thing that is keeping you away from your abundance is your thoughts and your feeling concerning what you presumably lack. It is like all you ever wanted is behind a door with a big sign that says "PULL" but you are standing in front of the door and PUSHING.  The feeling or heart part of the equation is significantly more difficult to deal with simply because most of us have  had little practice in controlling our feelings.  Our feelings, unlike our thoughts, cannot be faked.  At least not when it comes to  The LOA.  The good news is that it is a skill and like any skill it can be learned and mastered with practice.  

For starters work on being genuinely grateful for the little things you have.  Perhaps it can start with the fact that you have eyes to read this post.  If you look around you carefully you will find hundreds of things you can be thankful for.  I make it a point to start my day by writing down 10 things I am grateful for every day. You may thing it is hard to come up with 10 different things every day, but that is the beauty of the LOA, as you are grateful more things will come to you to be grateful for.  

We see then that we need both our head and our heart to utilize the LOA and at the same time we  have to be careful when using both.  Without thought our emotions will spiral all over the place and throw our manifestations into  chaos. Without emotions our thoughts have little to no power.  As you learn more and more you will be able to use your thoughts and emotions to create the amazing reality that you truly deserve.  YOU CAN BE WHAT YOU WILL TO BE.  

I hope you enjoyed this post and as always I welcome your comments on my Facebook page and Twitter feed. Please share this with anyone who may benefit from it. Till next week to your success. 

A JOURNEY OF A 1000 MILES… FORMULA

Good day and I hope you are having a great week. I am getting philosophical today to make a point. You have undoubtedly heard the saying “…a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step”. There is a big psychological lesson in that saying that I want to explore and as always link to The Law of Attraction.

I was contemplating weather I should do my “Insanity”™ workout or not the other day. Usually if I don’t get the workout out of the way in the morning, I get lazy and find excuses not to do it.  I was testing a theory so I got the DVD and put it in, and sort of lackadaisically started with the warm up. I was, as you may guess, not very much into it. As the warm up proceeded and I started to stretch I got more and more pumped up. Then the core of the workout began and before I knew it, I was done with my 60 minute workout.  I have found this to be true more often than not. Once I start something, no matter how unattractive the task, things start to get rolling and it gets done. On the other hand when I bitch and moan and find every excuse to avoid the task, not only the task does not get done, but I find myself in a worse mood than if I had just bit the bullet and got it done.

Along with the “just get started” portion of the formula goes the persistence to complete what you started. This is a trait that was ingrained in me by my mother. Even when it came to reading a book, she could not put a book down once she started it, even if she hated the story.  I don’t take it that far, but it is a very important part of my foundation, that once I start something I need to finish it. 

How does this fit into The Law of Attraction (LOA) scheme of things? Well let’s explore it together.  When you set some goal or desire into motion, you are presented with opportunities to take action. These opportunities rarely flow to you all at once and are set up like a row of dominoes pointing from the beginning to the end of the project. In fact I would venture to say it never happens that way. More often than not, you will get an opportunity, or an inclination to take a small step. Maybe an idea pops into your mind to do something small. Once you complete that step, as if by magic, other doors open leading you to other action steps. As you step through those doors more and more things happen and before you know it, you have what you want. By the way this is where most people who do not succeed with LOA fail. They want to have it all right now. If they cannot see the “how” of the whole project they do not take the baby steps, or if they do, they give up after one or two steps. In Think and Grow Rich Napoleon Hill mentioned, and I am paraphrasing here, that success tends to test you to see if you are ready for it. It rarely just gives you the prize.  Well it is all in the same context of taking a step and sticking to it. You grow when you take baby steps. You learn, and the good thing is that if you stumble, and surely you will sometimes, it is a lesson that you need to learn and can afford to learn. Imagine not gaining the experience necessary to run a multimillion dollar company by starting small and learning the ropes. The mistakes can be astronomical as compared to the small business mistakes you make. You learn one step at a time so when the bigger opportunities come, you do not make the colossal mistakes.

This concept is very well demonstrated in the 80% of the lottery winners who are broke or worse off within 3 years of winning the jackpot. They were not ready, or prepared to handle that kind of money because they were not comfortable or ready to handle what they had before. If you cannot handle a $50,000/year salary what makes you think you can handle a $5,000,000 / year salary. You are smoking crack it you think you can handle that. You may think you can, but you are wrong. I really like the way James Arthur Ray puts it in his book Harmonic Wealth: “it does not take a better man, but it does take a bigger man to handle more wealth”.  You have to grow to be able to handle bigger things. This is not just about money. It is equally applicable with relationships. If you cannot love yourself or cannot stand to be alone with yourself what makes you think you can love someone else? You can’t. 

In summary, start taking the baby steps. JUST START. THEN CONTINUE ON ONE STEP AT A TIME. It is amazing how well things go if you JUST START.  Try to put this lesson into action today. What is that one thing you have been putting off? Do it. Just start doing it NOW.

I hope you enjoyed this post. As always please put a comment on my Facebook Page and / or my Twitter feed and tell me what you think. If you have real life experiences that you think can benefit others, post them there as well. We can all learn from each other. Remember the more you share the more you get. If you want help, start by helping someone else. Till next week, here is to your Success.

BUS TRIP IN TEHRAN

Good day and I hope you are having a great day. I was traveling in the Middles East recently visiting my father who was very sick. Despite the reason for my visit, I found an interesting positive perspective and of all the places it came from my use of the Iranian Public Transportation System. 

At first glance this could have been a really bad situation, especially for someone from California who is used to having his own car. I was however, in a specially grateful mental state. Perhaps it was because I had no phone, no computer, no internet to distract me. Just utter peace and quiet from the technology that inundates my life on a daily bases.  Truth be told, I would not have lasted 30 seconds driving in Tehran.  It is one of the most amazing things I have witnessed. I have driven in Paris, Frankfurt, Boston and Los Angeles, but nothing compares.  The only way I can explain it is “organized Chaos”.  It was like an elaborate choreographed car chase dreamed up in Hollywood. Cars, Buses, mopeds, and pedestrians, flow effortlessly at the same time in 6 lanes of traffic, at times missing each other by mere inches. Yet there is very little accidents. Traffic signals and rules of the road have no meaning.  Perhaps they do but I could not make any sense of it. I was amazed that on any U.S. Highway there are numerous amount of accidents daily, even hourly causing a backlog of traffic issues, but here nothing.

I had an occasion to use a Taxi, and it was like a ride-a-long with an experienced race car driver in a crowded obstacle course.  I was so amazingly grateful that among all this chaos everyone gets where they are going without getting hurt. Mainly me. That thought led me to be thankful for the amazing convenience of my own vehicle back home. For the rules and regulations that keep things orderly. It was really eye-opening.  Then came the bus rides I took. Like any other part of the world the public transportation is crowded. What I was not prepared for however, was the immense amount of courtesy displayed by people who in my previous experience in other parts of the world, should have been frustrated.

I have ridden the buses, and metros in London, Chicago, Paris, and even New York.  In most cases, the drivers, and passengers rarely talked or looked at you. There is a sort of perpetual lack of expression and even frown on people’s faces from my experience.  Here in Tehran things were different. I am not saying everyone was in a Pollyanna jubilees mood, but they were very polite.  Imagine the conversation between the driver and the passenger. First of all you do not pay until you reach your destination. With the crowds in the theses buses, it is a sort of an honor system which could very easily be taken advantage of.  So the passenger comes to pay, the Driver sais “ghabelli nadareh” (it’s nothing, you honor me), to which the passenger will reply “lotf dareen” (you are too kind, please take this). To many who are not familiar with the Middle Eastern act of “Tarroff” (Flattery) this may seem strange. I found it very humorous and it put me in an instant mood of gratitude even though my 11 km trip took 2 hours.  It was one of the most cathartic experiences I have had, and it all started because I was grateful for one small thing. 

It occurred to me that since the act of Tarroff is so ingrained in the culture, they do not concentrate on the accidents, and there is no 24 hour media coverage of car accidents or traffic issues to keep on attracting these situations. Don’t get me wrong there is plenty of violence covered on their news but at least the car crashes and wrecks are not part of their regular “entertainment”.  What you give your attention to you will manifest. So if you have been ingrained to use flattery with strangers, that at least is going to make your day a bit better in a place where there is little to be happy about.  It definitely made my day.  See, you can always be grateful.  

I hope this was of interest to you. I welcome your comments on my Facebook and Twitter pages.  I welcome you to share this story with anyone who can benefit from it.  Till next week, to your success.