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Dear Friends

I cannot tell you how absolutely crucial it is to support your intentions with your feelings.  You cannot intend something while feeling the fear or doubt of it not happening.

Your intentions or desires will only be created/attracted when they are supported by the feelings that correspond with them.  It doesn’t happen any other way.  What is created most closely matches what is felt.

As Abraham so clearly and repeatedly explains, you cannot create what you want by pushing against or feeling the unpleasant feelings of what you don’t want.

What do you most desire now?  Is your attention fully on it?  Or is it on what you don’t want?  Are you feeling the joy, the power, the freedom, the ease of what you want?  Or are you feeling the stress, the certainty, the discomfort, the fear of what you don’t want?

Match your intentions with your good feelings and see them manifest.  It’s certain!

Blessings,

Lucy

Awakening to Happiness, Abundance and Freedom!

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I believe it was Earl Nightingale who used the expression ‘cheerful expectancy‘ to describe an attitude of mind in relation to our intentions and goals.  By ‘cheerful expectancy’, he meant the optimism, confidence and preparedness to receive or achieve that which we have intended.

An attitude of  ‘cheerful expectancy’ leaves no room for despondency, dread, failure or doubt.  What an absolutely marvelous attitude to have, wouldn’t you say?

Note that ‘cheerful expectancy’  leaves no room for failure.  The implication of this is profound!  Let me explain.

If you have an attitude that denies you failure, it means that regardless of the outcome of any intention or goal you’ve set, you will have succeeded!  Wow!  Is that empowering or what?

Now I know you’re probably thinking, ‘Here we go again, playing with words’ or ‘playing with your mind’.  Well, guess what?

You’re absolutely right!

I am absolutely suggesting, encouraging, actually URGING you to play with your words and play with your mind!  Because if you don’t, then you will effectively be leaving others to do it for you and relying on others who have already done it for you.

Yes, I mean all those people in your life, past and present, including your parents, teachers, bosses and peers, who have been feeding you with beliefs encoded in words and intellectual manipulations to influence your thinking.

Now, I am not suggesting that these people did any of this with malice but they probably did it to preserve a belief and value system that they had bought into and that compelled them to ‘recruit’ others, including yourself, into.  And, more than likely, they have succeeded.

Get this: You live your life according to words and intellectual manipulations i.e. beliefs, attitudes and judgments.  But these particular words and manipulations are not innate aspects of who you are.  Rather, you have learned or acquired them.  Which makes it equally possible and necessary for you to learn and acquire those words and manipulations that serve your true desires – desires for happiness, peace, abundance, love and freedom.

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So, the question that I am asking you now is this:

What words, what meanings and what manipulations (thoughts) would you prefer to have?  What attitudes are you prepared to choose now?

For instance, are you prepared to choose to

Use these words:  Every outcome is a success.
Have this attitude:  I have created this outcome and I will benefit from it no matter what!
Think these thoughts:  What is the success quality in this outcome?  What useful thing can I get out of this?

Wow!  How does that feel?

So, are you prepared to play with your words and your mind or are you going to keep letting others play with them?

Lucy Lopez

Awakening to Happiness!

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You know that when you’ve planted a seed, whether in a pot or the ground, that you really should leave it be.  I mean, you know that you’d destroy its ability to germinate and grow if you were to dig it up everyday to check that it was ‘doing something’, right?

You also know that you will help and enhance its ability to germinate and grow by providing the right conditions for it, such as the right kind of soil, a suitable amount of water and the right position in relation to other plants (including weeds), sunlight and water drainage.  Without these conditions, your seed may never grow or it might take a very long time and even then, the plant it produces is likely to be unhealthy.

As for digging up your seed, it is as if you are trying to tell it or show it how to be a seed and how to germinate and grow!  But you know that is best left to the seed and its ‘innate intelligence’, don’t you?

I’ve noticed for some time now that the same principles hold true in all areas of life (including raising children and growing relationships!).  Take an intention or goal that you have, for instance.  It is rather like a seed which has its own ‘intelligence’ if you like.  ‘Digging’ it up, whether frequently or infrequently, will not give it the chance and freedom to grow!  It’s like trying to show the seed how to be a seed!  What you do have to do instead is provide the right conditions for your ’seed’/intention to germinate and grow.

So, what are the right conditions?

It depends on what your intention or goal is.  If, for example, your intention is to be happy, filling your mind with unhappy thoughts, judging people and things to be anything but good, seeking revenge or wanting to outdo someone are all poor ‘conditions’ for your intention.

Clearly, the ‘right’ conditions for this particular seed would be to do the things that allow you to be happy, things such as being grateful, having joyous, uplifting conversations, thinking and speaking well of yourself and others, collaborating rather than competing and looking for the good in everyone and everything.

The same principle can be applied to any intention or goal.  If your intention is to have financial independence, constantly doubting or questioning this intention is equivalent to digging up your seed to see if it is doing what it needs to be doing!  Don’t expect it to grow.

On the other hand, by providing the right conditions for its growth, you will be supporting and enhancing the growth/manifestation of your intention.

So, what might these conditions be?

The best way to provide the right conditions is to think in terms of ‘If I were financially independent, what would my life be like?  What decisions would I be making?  What work would I be doing?  What passions would I be engaging?  Who would I spend my time with?  How would I behave, speak, and think?  What goals would I set for myself?

Once you have your answers, act on them.  Even if you took one small action in relation to each of your answers, you would be providing excellent conditions for your intention/’seed’ to grow and manifest!  There is always at least one small action that you can take.  ALWAYS!

Now here is something else that you should be aware of.  When you start providing the right conditions for your ’seed’/intention, you are activating a mindset of ‘expectancy‘.   This is a powerful psychological space to be in.  Expectancy is a magnet or frequency bandwidth that attracts or resonates with matching frequencies.  In other words, expectancy attracts that which you have intended!

So, what seed have you been wanting to plant?  What seed have you planted and been counter-productively digging up to try and tell it how to do its job?  What seed have you planted without providing the ‘right conditions’?

Whatever seed you have, stop digging it up and start providing it with the right conditions now.  Start by making sure that you have planted it in the right place, where there are no ‘weeds’ i.e. thoughts, beliefs, words and actions that work against it.

(For example, if your seed is financial independence, a weed that you do not want is the belief that financial independence for you is impossible or hard).

Provide the other conditions such as thoughts, words,  beliefs and people (if you can find them) that support your intention.  Take action, no matter how small.  It is not the size of the action that matters.  It is that you act in support of your intention, your seed!  Do it now!

Blessings

Lucy Lopez

Awakening to Happiness!

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Image from Stream Radio

What is the most difficult thing about managing anger?

Rather than answer that question for you, I am going to make a list of the things that people (including my clients and I) find difficult about anger management and I will invite you to consider which of these is the most difficult for you.  Here is the list and in no particular order:

1. Recognizing my anger
2. Acknowledging and accepting my anger
3. Not blaming someone or something else for my anger
4. Not beating myself up for being angry and reacting in anger
5. Not reacting in anger
6. Letting my anger go
7. Getting to my anger (i.e. getting it under control) before it gets me
8. Preventing myself from getting angry

Too many people believe that anger is a ‘natural‘ thing which they cannot really do anything about.  There is nothing ‘natural’ about anger.  It is a learned response.  We have learned to be angry just as we have learned to be sad, jealous, impatient, guilty and a host of other negative emotions.  Just because the learning has not been ‘formal’ does not mean it did not happen.  In fact, there is very little in this human existence that we have not learned in the informal ’school of life’!

Because we have learned so well how to be angry, our experience of anger has been set to auto-pilot!  Certain triggers will result in our angry reaction.  Therefore, one of the key steps we must take in managing our anger is to recognize the triggers.

In the case of my priest friend in my last post, it was clear that one of the triggers for his anger was his colleague.  Please do not confuse a ‘trigger’ with a ’cause’.  His colleague did not cause his anger.  The cause of his anger or anyone’s anger is, as I explained in my last post, the belief that we are losing control. The cause is ultimately fear.

Next, it is necessary to recognize the various ways in which your anger is expressed.  This requires careful and compassionate self-observation.  Think back to times when you have been angry.  How was your anger expressed?  What did you think, say and do?

Having recognized both the triggers and the ways in which your anger was expressed, you will need to go through some self-analysis.  It would take too long to go through this in detail in this post but here are some questions to guide you:

• Why was I angry?
• Is the other person/thing truly the cause of my anger?
• Do I believe the other person/thing deserves to be punished with my anger? (Be honest now :-))
• Do I believe that the other person/thing is responsible for my happiness or the absence of it?
• Do I believe that punishing someone/thing with my anger is more important than being happy?
• Does it help me to get and stay angry? How?  What do I gain/lose?
• Do I want to be angry?  (This one is a lot more tricky than you think :-))
• How would I prefer to respond?

A lady I know frequently shares her irritation with other people and things with me.  I dare say that I too am one of the ’causes’ of her irritation (according to her beliefs) :-).  On numerous occasions, I have noticed how annoyed she gets because ‘the world is not the way she wants it to be’.  Someone’s hairstyle annoys her.  Someone’s music annoys her.  She ‘cannot understand’ (meaning she refuses to accept) why someone would choose to behave in a certain way or make the choices they make.  Being in her company is often a wonderful reminder to me of how so many of us allow other people and things to determine our state of happiness!

Another friend who is generally exuberant morphs into a different species at the most unexpected times.  Sitting in my car, he may snarl at a driver who he perceives has done the wrong thing.  The change can be startling.  One moment he is a belly-full of laughs, the next an angry beast!

I mention these people as examples, and possibly, reflections of our own behaviors!  Our anger is triggered by a variety of things and we react without warning and habitually/automatically.  So,

recognizing the triggers

recognizing the ways in which we express our anger and

self – analysis

are all necessary things to help us understand and manage our anger.

One of the hardest things in dealing with anger is to catch it before it catches us i.e. to intercept our automatic reactions.  Here is where we can once again use the power of our mind to great effect.  For one thing, you can plant the seed of a different response ahead of time using affirmations or visualizations.

For instance, if you know you are going to encounter a familiar ‘trigger’ sometime during the day, you could start your day by offering your conscious and subconscious mind the intention that you will maintain your peace and happiness throughout the day and in your encounter with the trigger.  By the way, this practice is one that you could do as a standard practice for intending peace and joy in your day.  Also, note that this intention (or any intention for that matter) must be stated in the affirmative rather than negative e.g.

“I intend to stay peaceful and joyous when I meet with XX”.

rather than

“I won’t lose my temper with XX”.

It is important (as I’ve explained in my posts about affirmations) that you summon the corresponding emotional support for this intention.  In other words, allow yourself to feel the peace and happiness that you desire.

Another thing you can do is to practise offering silence in a loving way.  Too many of us have learned to offer silence as a substitute for anger.  Our silence is therefore not a peaceful one but one inflamed with anger, contempt and vindictive thoughts.  But you can offer silence as a gift of love to yourself and, as a natural consequence, to another.

Once again, your mind can be primed for this proactively by making the decision that if anger is triggered, your response will be loving silence.  Don’t worry or beat yourself up if you don’t actually feel love in that moment.  Focus on your intention of love!

Also, if  you can manage it, tell the person that you wish to remain silent as you consider it to be a more useful response than anything else you can say or do.  Whenever I have done this, I have been amazed at how the tension in the air immediately dissipates and the free flow of loving energy just seems to permeate our environment!  Truly powerful.

As you can see from above, some of the most effective behaviors we can use in anger management are often the simplest and most readily available to us, so simple and so cost-free that we tend to dismiss them and undermine their potential!  Deep breathing is another one of them.  By breathing deeply, softly and slowly, we allow the anger that we are holding on to and which is thus resisting the free flow of loving energy to dissipate. LITERALLY!

You see, we are by nature free-flowing energy.  Our learned behaviors such as anger obstructs the flow of this energy because we are holding on to some part of that energy instead of letting it flow freely (think of a stream and how placing a large object in its way can impede or stop its flow altogether).  Conscious and deep breathing releases our hold and restores the natural free-flow of energy.  This is the principle behind the traditional, Eastern practices of working with ‘prana‘ or ‘chi‘.

Finally, let me say that the key to anger management lies in attentiveness to oneself.  By constantly drawing your attention inward to what is happening within you rather than what someone is saying or doing to you, you will effectively return control to where it truly lies – in you!

In future posts, I shall share with you some visualizations/meditations that I guide people in.  In the meantime, if you haven’t already read or heard these, I invite you to:

A beautiful meditation for the happiness of all

Happiness with the Look of Love or The Gaze of Peace and the audio

Once again, I invite you to share your experiences with me and/or any questions you may have!

Lucy Lopez

Awakening to Happiness!

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