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GREGG BROWN, a training consultant in Vancouver, British Columbia, is living in the dream condominium overlooking the waters of the Pacific Ocean that he once thought was out of his price range. More than a year ago, Gregg saw a listing for a beautiful condo on Beach Avenue. He cut out the ad and looked at it every day for a month, and eventually forgot about it. In July of this year, he bought a condo in this same building on Beach Ave. “As I was packing,” says, Gregg, “I found the condo listing that I'd been looking at a year before. Guess what? Without realizing it, I ended up buying the exact same apartment that I had visualized a year before! The owners had taken it off the market a year before, because it hadn't sold. They reduced the price and had just put it back the market when we were apartment hunting. For a year, every time I'd walk along the beach, I'd look up at the building and say to myself, ‘I'm going to live there.’" This is how life works when you do your inner work. What is inner work, you ask? It’s asking for what you want with a deep and true desire and staying open to seeing opportunities when they arise. Inner work is creating a space within for what you want to manifest. It’s choosing to feel good and choosing to look for good everywhere in your life. When you imagine good things coming to you, and you eliminate doubt and negativity in thoughts and conversation, you literally open the channel for your dreams to come true. The Past is Over and the Present is Unfolding At the moment, you may have an illness or financial problem that doesn’t feel all that good to you! The spiritual challenge for all of us is to stay open to possibility—even miracles. Pain is a part of human existence. Our inner work is to avoid the trap of thinking that our future will be just like our past. The pains and frustrations of the past were created out of the beliefs you were manifesting then, and the choices that you made from the information you had then. Create a Happy New Year To create a fertile beginning for an exciting 2004, clean up your actions, thoughts, and conversation. Here’s how: Eliminate the words 'don’t, not,' and 'no' as much as possible. Maintaining awareness and choosing different words will bring a new reality. Avoid the temptation to talk about problems. Wow, that seems like a conversation-stopper, doesn’t it? However, we know that thought, language, and action creates the world we live in. The key is not to speak from a dis-empowered stance. For example, instead of saying, “I can’t afford to take a vacation. I’m too broke. I can’t get time off.” You could choose a different presentation, such as, “I’d love to get away for awhile.” “I’d love to travel to Italy or take a cruise around the Greek Isles.” (and stop there! Don’t add on, “but I can’t because I can’t afford it and I’m working ninety hours a week, and my boss won’t give me time off, or, I’m afraid I’m going to get laid off.”) Don’t throw out details that you don’t want to manifest. Keep your overall focus on the positive qualities in your life. Offer gratitude whenever you have a few spare minutes, in the shower, driving, or waiting in line. Look at the big picture. Imagine finding your house on the Internet using Mapquest.com. Increase the detail until you can see yourself thinking about losing your job, trying to find clients, how you are going to come up with health insurance, worries over your children, or the lack of a sweetie in your life. Now use your mouse button, and click several times until you see your house from further away. You see lawns, and flowers and trees, and people’s cars and the lushness of a whole neighborhood. Then zoom to a higher view and sense serenity and well-being as a predominant force. Babies are being born, people are doing good things for each other, and life keeps flowing. Remember the good times you’ve had. Notice how your body does keep healing itself. Notice that good people do keep coming into your life. Money does have a way of showing up, and friends do call you up and seek your company or your advice. Don’t worry about turning into a pie-in-the-sky idealist. Anytime you want to land with a thud emotionally, just turn on the radio or TV! Raise your vibration. Once you hold positive thoughts, you begin to vibrate with the energy of well-being. Once you are radiating and vibrating good energy, by Law of Attraction, good things of a similar vibration--which means they feel good to you and match a desire you have expressed—begin to come to you. Put yourself in the medium of that which you want to manifest. In the story above, Gregg walked by the condo building on the beach and said, “I’m going to live there.” He immersed himself in the vibration of the beach. Similarly, my friend, Gary McAvoy in Seattle, Washington, wanted to write a novel. He took a temporary part-time job escorting authors in town on book tours. He met an incredible array of famous authors, and today is co-authoring a book with legendary anthropologist, Jane Goodall. He immersed himself in the medium of writing, books, and authorship. Let God handle the details. Gregg wanted that condo. It wasn’t his job to figure out how to make it possible. He just had to keep holding a good feeling and keep making choices in that direction (for example, committing his search to that building.) He didn’t ask the landlords to take the condo off the market until he could afford it, nor did he ask them to reduce the price. Those are external attempts to control a situation in order to “make things happen.” Gregg did both the internal work of continuing to vibrate at a high frequency, and the external footwork of following up when opportunities arrived. Your desire is there for a reason. We summon everything into our lives by the power of our desire. When our life doesn’t reflect what we desire, that contrasting energy fuels our desire for something else. Synchronistic Signs Signal a Higher Order Often during transitions, the universe sends us encouragement. For example, Hiroko Takano teaches Japanese at an all-girls school in Palo Alto, California. The small enrollment in her class may mean it will be cancelled. Shortly after a discouraging meeting with her boss, Hiroko had dinner with a friend, Misao Takahara, who shared incredible synchronicities with the repeated occurrence of the number 22. When Hiroko left, she noticed that her odometer read 222.2. “Even though I realized that the last two numbers of my license plate were also 22, I didn’t take this second occurrence of 2222 seriously,” she said. “The next morning, on the way to work, I was worrying about the future of my class. I stopped at a red light and noticed a number 22 bus stopped at the side of the road. The license plate on the car behind the 22 bus was 222. Across the street was another 22 bus. “Recently, when I was trying to decide whether or not to get a substitute teacher so I could go on a trip I was planning, I thought ‘Well, if I’m meant to go, things will work out. I must focus on the present, not the future.’ As I was thinking this, I saw a car with the license plate number 222 right in front of me! This seemed to be an affirmation for staying in the present. On the way to work this morning, I was thinking so much about my future that I missed the exit and ended up taking the next one. The number 22 bus was right there as if it were waiting for me. These incidents made me realize how important it is to live in the present, without worrying about outcomes. I know everything happens for a reason and that everything is perfect! I have a feeling that 22 is teaching me that it’s time to move out of my comfort zone.” Hiroko’s attention to the number 22 serves as an affirmation that a higher source is always available to open doors for us and calm our fears of the unknown. What Is Your Dream? Have you ever dreamed of pulling up stakes and moving to another country? Do your dream of learning another language? Or raising funds for a good cause? Or developing your creativity? Or starting completely over? The first part of manifesting a dream is to have one. My friend Dianne Aigaki, an artist and grant writer, is a woman who has made dozens of life dreams come true. In my book, The Purpose of Your Life, she talks about deciding to live permanently in Dharamsala, India because it felt so good to be around people who practiced the principles taught by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Dianne accomplished her move over the past three years, and keeps finding ways to learn from and assist displaced Tibetans. For example, she’s organized tours for Tibetan monks, which raised several hundred thousand dollars for their monastery in India, and she and friends have fostered other small business projects in the area. Dianne has built a Tibetan-style house constructed of rocks perched at the foot of the towering Himalayas. Her needs are simple. In the local economy, she can easily support herself by grant writing workshops once or twice a year in the United States. Dianne’s emails to friends reflect her joie de vivre, and sometimes read like National Geographic written by staff writers of Saturday Night Live. “I am taking a three-month intensive Tibetan class. I love it, and now I want to take classes in painting and watercolors. I learned that my name means The Witch Who Can Kill With a Stare, which made me laugh, but won’t be funny if I introduce myself to Gaddhi shepherds in the hill tribes!” Someone asked Dianne to write a speech about keeping the Bhotia [Tibetan] language alive, which will be given in front of His Holiness at a Himalayan conference. “I didn’t even know what Bhotia was, but, of course, that didn’t stop me from saying I would do it. On I go as a ghost writer for lamas…. “I have submitted a proposal to the United Nations for the parks project in McLeod Ganj [the town which houses Tibetan refugees and is the center of the Tibetan government in exile], with the hope that some day our hillsides will be pristine, and we will be known as the Garden Jewel of the Himalayas. The project is a partnership between Richard Gere’s Foundation, Rotary Dharamsala (where I am now the only woman with fifty Indian men—what a team), the McLeod Ganj Community Parks and Garden Association (my registered trust), and the Himachal Pradesh Forest Department. We have high hopes. “At the end of December, I will be going to Thailand to think, read, get daily massages, and eat great Thai food. I will spend about six weeks just hanging around and painting, and then back to Dharamsala to build those parks. Okay that sums it up. Let me in on what’s happening with you in your corner of the world. Love, Dianne” Whew! What flowing enthusiasm and optimism. What an ability to step into the unknown. Rhythm and Germination What do we learn from someone who successfully, and repeatedly, makes her dreams come true? What caught your attention? I noticed her comment about planning to take time off and be with herself, to cultivate down-time before she leaps back into her dream-making. Rest and time for germination are necessary components for bringing our goals to fruition. Usually we want our goals to be achieved the minute we think of them, but life has a way of giving us homework and time to refine or rethink. How often do you shift gears by doing nothing? I remember a quote by a man who said something like, “You’ll never make a million dollars if you can’t spend one whole day in bed each week just reading and relaxing.” Let’s remember to turn off our “urgency mode” and relax. Remember life is even now preparing to make your dreams come true. Perhaps you’d like to take the points of this essay that most resonated with you and write one on each month of the year to remind you of how to make your dreams come true. Happy 2004,
Carol Adrienne
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