2. Turn off phones and anything that’s going to ring, bing, buzz, ping or chime—except for your timer. Set a timer. If you’re using your phone for this, turn off the ringer and texting sounds, or just put it into Airplane Mode until you’ve finished.
3. Sit quietly, close your eyes, and find a boring sound to focus on. I love the sound of a stream or river. I love the sounds of wind chimes on a breezy day. I also love honing in on the sound of the air conditioner or the fridge humming or a small fountain trickling. Focusing on a sound tricks your mind into being quiet. Instead of listening to all those thoughts, we’re listening to the sound we’ve chosen. Recordings can work well for this, too. But not guided meditations with vocal instructions. Those are great and have their own use, but our goal here is to listen to our Higher Self, not the voice of an instructor. There are a few recordings, though, that are non-intrusive enough that they can work, and you can certainly find your own. If there’s a melody though, make sure it’s a repetitive, short riff.
*I love the “Mostly Meditation” recording from Esther Hicks Vortex Meditations collection. It’s the bonus track and is only available on the digital download, not on the CD. You can find that one here: http://www.abraham-hickslawofattraction.com/lawofattractionstore/product/S_GMD_1_DIG-DLD-zip.html
*I also love Heather Noel’s Toning Meditation, which you can find on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6VfcChSPQ
*Any recording that uses chimes, bells, singing bowls, or didgeridoos are wonderful.
If you use a recording, a headset is nice, because it cancels out competing noise. However, I have to add that when competing noises crop up, it makes me focus just a little bit harder on the sound I’m listening for, and my mind silences even more.
4. Count your breaths. Inhale and count to three, pause for a beat or two, then exhale and count to five, and pause for a beat or two. This pattern works for me. You might find a different count that works better for you. I find that just the breath counting, without the sound isn’t quite enough for me. And just the sound without the breath-counting isn’t enough either. But the combination of the two will usually result in my mind going quiet.
Do not expect a stream of babble to come from Source into your head. Silence is what you’re going for here. Silence. The wisdom you’ve downloaded will make itself known to you after.
How Do I Know if it ’s Working?
You’ll be sitting there, counting breaths, focusing on the droning sound of your choice, and suddenly you’ll realize you’re thinking about what to make for dinner tonight, or remembering the bill you forgot to pay, or plotting your next novel. :) When that happens, just let it go, and shift your attention back to the sounds, and back to counting breaths. Sometimes (usually), this happens over and over and over again. But you get a few seconds, and sometimes even a few minutes in between where your mind is actually quiet. And that’s plenty. Source’s internet is extremely fast.
Don’t beat up on yourself when thoughts come. That’s your brain doing what it was made to do. Just keep pulling your focus back to the nothing-sound and nonsense counting, and relax about it all.
If you do this every day, it will get easier and easier, and your quiet times will get longer and more frequent.
If you do it first thing, before you do anything else in your day, before breakfast even, you’ll find it more effective, too, because your brain hasn’t got all wound up with other things. Wake, meditate. Then start your day.
You will know when you’re experiencing true quiet. There’s this sense of elation, ultra-relaxation and pure appreciation when you finish. I often feel, when I first open my eyes, as if Source is sitting at the wheel. (I picture it like the little alien inside the old man’s head in Men in Black, sitting at a control panel like the bridge of a ship, piloting the whole body.) Often, I sit there, and stay as quiet as I can, to let Source bask in everything for a few minutes through me. Often, the appreciation is so intense I tear up a little bit.
And, yes, Source is always looking out through my eyes, and doing a ride-along inside my body. But these times just feel like more somehow. Maybe because all the busy mind chatter is quiet, and I’m more aware of her there, looking out through my eyes and basking in this beautiful physical world of ours.
I’ve never had a glaring neon message like “Here’s the path to world peace” appear in my head during or after my daily quiet times. But I get tons of other stuff. All of the “The Goddess Speaks” sections in this book came to me during or near the end of meditation. Other times when things float into my awareness during my quiet time but I’m not finished yet, I just make a mental note, and then go back to my quiet again.
I feel my health is better, my intuition sharper, my actions more effective, my ideas more brilliant, and that things just line up for me more easily when I’m meditating most days, than when I’m not.
Doing this every day, or as many days a week as we possibly can manage (it’s only 10 or 15 minutes, after all) is the best way to shift from the mole’s perspective to the eagle’s—from our limited, physical point of view, to the wide, broad, limitless perspective of our Higher Self.
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Assignment 13
Bliss Up Your Connection
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Start your own meditation practice. Experiment with different methods, different sounds to focus on, different physical positions (sitting, lying down, etc.) and different places in and around your home, until you’ve found what works best for you. Try this several days in a row and don’t give up easily. You’re plugging in to the biggest Internet of all when you meditate. It feels great and it’s great for you.
Journal after each session, about how you feel, how you think it’s going, any sensations you noticed and so on. And if odd things start coming through your special pen, just let them flow.
The Goddess Speaks
I am consciousness. I am One and I am many. I am you, I am he, I am she, I am they. I am one and many.
I am consciousness, experiencing all delicious life through you, and all you experience nourishes me, thrills me. Us. We live through you, and to me, to us, it ’s like riding a roller coaster. What a journey! It’s never-ending.
Like a child, I relish all you do. Delight ripples through me, joy bursts from me. All because of you.
I live through you. The more delicious your experiences, the more fun it is for me. But I cherish them all. And I bask in all you are.
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Chapter Twelve
The Power of Belief
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“…if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
—Matthew 17:20
“By all the pow’rs of land and sea, as I do will, so mote it be. ”
–The Witch’s Rune, Doreen Valiente
We have a power beyond the imagination of most humans, and it is the power of belief. Not just what we say we believe, but what we actually believe, way down deep in our souls, and how those beliefs evolve throughout our lifetimes, and how we choose to allow them to evolve. (Because we’re in charge of that.)
The reason why religions talk so much about faith is because it truly is all-powerful. Faith is belief. It’s a confident belief. It’s a certainty. It’s when you believe in something as strongly as you believe in gravity, as strongly as you believe in the existence of something that’s standing there, right now, in front of you, something that you can feel and see and touch. As strongly as you believe in the hands at the ends of your arms.
That kind of faith for something unseen is beyond what most people think they can muster, but it’s easy to cultivate and nurture and grow. Believing is what we’re designed to do, after all. Our Souls hunger for it. And deep down, we know. Believing is easy.
What, Exactly, Am I Supposed to Believe IN?
That’s the beauty of it. You get to choose!
For me,
it begins with this very simple idea.
The Source of All, which some call God, Goddess, or the Universe, is the same energy that lives in me. I am Spirit in body. I am Goddess in physical form. The energy that makes up my Soul, that gives life and consciousness to my body is Divine energy.
The physical world is a projection of Divine consciousness. And since I’m part of Divine consciousness, I too have the power to create. It takes only awareness, presence, and deliberately choosing where my attention goes. As I shape my focus, my beliefs, and my expectations, so I shape my experience.
All that exists is vibrational in nature, and all things that vibrate on the same frequency are drawn to each other. To change the nature of the reality I am living, I need only change my frequency. Tune my dial.
Everything else springs from there. That’s my foundation. Once I have that basic understanding of how and why things work, I get to choose any faith or religion that appeals to me. Because the Law of Attraction isn’t a religion any more than the Law of Gravity is. It’s just an explanation of how things work.
I chose the religion of Wicca, because it spoke to me, and believe me, as a lifelong seeker, I’ve studied and followed many spiritual paths along the way. I love the woman-centric focus of Wicca. I love the idea of visualizing the dual energies of nature as a Goddess and a God. I love the ritual aspects of it, the candles, the incense, the crystals, herbs and oils. I love spell casting, because it’s just a focused blast of vibrational alignment with the magical goal. I love that the only commandment is “Harm none,” and how you could write a tome analyzing what that means. And I love a worship service that consists of a wooded glade, a bonfire, a few djembe drummers and a lot of dancing.
Pick any belief system that speaks to your Soul and love it. But remember that it’s no better and no truer than anyone else’s. If I believe in something, it’s true for me. I cannot know what’s true for anyone else.
How to Change Our Channel
The way to align our vibration with the life we want is by deliberately focusing on things that match our desires. If we want peace, we focus on peaceful things, wear peaceful colors, listen to peaceful music, watch peaceful shows, read peaceful novels and find peace where we already are. If we want excitement, we focus on adventures and exciting things, and we do exciting things, and find excitement where we already are. If we want health, we surround ourselves with health, eat things and do things that we relate to good health, believe ourselves healthy, and constantly look for evidence to support that belief and celebrate the health we already have.
We control all of it. We attune to the station playing the life we want, and the life we want manifests all around us.
And we, as a species, focusing on a better world, can create a better world. What we do to or for any one of us, we do to and for all of us.
But it’s not once and done. Our desires, both individually and as a Whole, are constantly growing and expanding. We achieve one goal, only so that we can stand at a different level, and from there, look out around us from a new perspective, identifying new challenges, experiencing new experiences, and launching new desires.
The act of identifying what we want and then aligning ourselves with it and watching it appear in our lives is one of the most thrilling things we can do. Co-creating with a partner is even more thrilling. Co-creating with like-minded people takes it to a whole new level, and co-creating globally is the best of all. It’s like learning the most powerful form of magic. We are creating our reality in every minute of every day of our physical lives. We are doing it all the time, even when we aren’t aware of it.
Belief is the most powerful tool we can develop. Believe in what you want. First believe it’s possible, and then believe it’s probable, and then believe it’s inevitable, and then believe it’s already done and start looking for evidence to prove it. Start finding that you already have bits of it. Start feeling the way you’ll feel when you have all of it. That’s everything. It’s everything, honestly.
Believe in your inherent Divinity. Believe in your immortality. Believe that you are creating everything in your life, and then set about creating what you want, and stop creating what you don’t.
All it takes is practice and persistence to master this, and it takes even less to prove to yourself that it’s true.
Try it first with something you feel is easy. Note that nothing is easier or harder to create than anything else. But if you believe it’s harder, then it is. So, start with something that feels easy to you.
Focus on something like, oh, I don’t know, sea shells. Look at photos of seashells. Look at sea shell jewelry. Pick up the conch shell on your bookshelf and hold it to your ear like when you were a kid. Doodle seashells. Insert sea shell references into random conversations. Soon you’re going to start noticing seashells everywhere you go. A bumper sticker here, a wallpaper pattern there, a billboard, a TV ad.
This is a tiny experiment, but it’s a powerful one, because it solidifies the belief that we really can tune in what we want to experience.
The More I Want Something, the Harder it Comes
“I want it so bad!” is a phrase we’ve all used. It’s a clue, like all things are. When I want something bad, it usually means that not having it feels bad. Having it would feel good. But not having it feels bad.
It usually means that I’m not capable of thinking about this thing I want without feeling its absence. It’s not here yet. When I want it bad, I’m not attuned to the same energy of having the thing. If I had the thing, I would no longer be yearning for it so desperately, right?
So the more we want a thing, the harder it can be to think about it without feeling its lack. And any time we feel its lack, we attune to its lack. It can’t exist for us on this channel. We have to tune in to having it, and then we will.
The solution to this can sometimes be to stop thinking about the thing at all, to trust that it’s done and will arrive just as soon as we tune it in, and let it go at that. We know it will be. We know it already is; it’s just on a different wavelength than we are right now.
And then we can move on and think about how having it will feel. We can start practicing that feeling. We can also start doing other things that give us something similar to that feeling. I might ride a roller coaster to experience the thrill of falling in love. I might read romance novels with their guaranteed happy endings. I might watch old Carey Grant films. I can get into the groove of falling in love. But if those things make me feel sad, then I’ll just stick with the roller coaster. If I can feel romantic and bubbly with joy, then I’ll radiate that. And its match will find me.
This is the process. This is how we align, time after time, on subject after subject. We stop noticing lack, release the need. We trust that it’s done, and start tuning to the answer. Start tuning to plenty. Notice everything in our life that we have plenty of, even if we have to start with plenty of stones in the gravel out front. Start there, and keep going. Plenty of friends. Plenty to eat. Plenty of fun. And laughter. And good times. And sunshine. And love. Start feeling that joy of plenty. Stop worrying about running out, and trust that we’ve got this. We’ve got this. And we keep going that way. We notice friends who’ve done well for themselves, and feel happy for them and happy for ourselves, because seeing their success helps us believe in our own. Every success is proof that we can do it, too. And we tune to that and now we’re really rolling. And now we’re acting on it, getting ideas, making a plan, and things are getting better. Things are lining up. And all of the sudden, there’s abundance in all those places where it wasn’t before.
Over and over, with every subject, we experience the pain of the “problem,” and then we know the solution. And it’s done. All we have to do is tune it in. Feel like we’ll feel when we have it. Be grateful in advance. Celebrate it now, and everything like it. Wallow in everything like it, having fun while we wait, and bam! There it is.
That’s all it is. That’s all it is. Tune your dial. Cha
nge your life.
In a Nutshell
In the end, it boils down to this;
Everything that exists is a transmitter. You’re a transmitter. The tree outside your window is one. The dog lying on your feet is one. Everything transmits, each at its own specific frequency.
And you are also a receiver. So are all things.
When the receiver is tuned to the same frequency as the transmitter, their wavelengths match, and the two merge and meld. They co-exist. The sound you cannot hear becomes the sound you can hear as soon as you tune the dial on your radio. But the song was there the whole time, you just couldn’t hear it until you tuned to the channel playing it.
The things you want in your life exist; they are here. They came into being the second you realized you wanted them. They all exist; you just can’t see them until you tune your dial to the frequency where they live.
All you ever need to do is tune yourself to the frequency of what you want your life to be. Tune yourself to joy. Tune yourself to vibrant health. Tune yourself to a life of generous, confident abundance. And tune yourself to the world you want to see. Tune yourself to peace. Tune yourself to paradise.
Tune yourself to love. In the end, that’s the goal. Tune yourself to love.
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Assignment 14
Tune to Bliss 111.1 FM
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Tune your dial, right now.
Every night, before bed, I want you to pick up your journal and write down the top 5 things that happened to you today. If you feel like that’s going to take too long, then you can do the top 3 things.
Write one good thing down, and then stop, close your eyes, and recall that thing. Remember it. Experience it again in your mind. Feel again how good it felt, or how it made you smile. Just experience it until it starts to fade, and then open your eyes.
The Bliss Book Page 12