September 14th, 2016
Over the Summer holidays, I read E2 by Pam Grout. I have read plenty of books on quantum physics and the art of manifesting but this book was different. The author is fun to read but, more importantly, she provides experiments to prove once and for all that we are all energy and that we affect the energy of people and objects in our environment.
Animals are great teachers. They have an immediate reaction to people before they have even interacted. I watch my dog and cat whenever we have someone over for the first time. Sometimes they'll go over and cuddle, other times they stay away. I once saw my dog growl when a man came over to give us a quote for some renovations. The fur stood up on her back. I did not take this lightly.
We were all intuitive at one time. As children, we sensed the energy of the people around us and responded without censoring ourselves. I recall sitting on a man's lap at the bus station. I just walked over and sat on his lap. I think he was homeless. It felt very natural and I sensed that he needed some love. I only felt scared when I saw the look on my mother's face. She was looking a bit pale and asked me to come with her. I said goodbye to my new friend and hopped off his lap.
As we get older, we learn to ignore our gut and overlook signs that we are in danger, that a job isn't right for us or that we shouldn't trust the salesman trying to sell us life insurance. We not only numb ourselves to the reaction we have to others, we also send signals to the universe without realizing it. There are so many books on the power of positive thinking or explaining how to attract more money, men or health. We affirm and visualize to achieve our goals.
This book goes one step further. It takes us through nine experiments to show the direct result between our thoughts, the energy or frequency of these thoughts and their impact on our life. The first challenge involves requesting a sign from the universe within 48 hours. The second experiment proves that the world is a mirror. It reflects our expectations. My daughters and I set the intention of seeing green cars for the next 48 hours. I have never seen so many shades of green. My daughters got a kick out of it. They have repeated this experiment with other colours.
Then, I asked my mother to bring over her wire hangers and we tried the following exercise. You unwind the wire, attach a straw to the bent end and think about something you love while holding a hanger in each hand. Then you switch to focusing on something you hate. Negative thoughts shrink your energy and your hangers fold into one another. Love expands your energy, pushing the ends of each hanger away from each other. We used this activity just before my daughters started school. They were afraid of getting mean teachers or being in a class away from their friends. I asked them to draw a picture of themselves surrounded by their best friends and a smiling teacher. They didn't think it would work. Watching the impact of their thoughts on the hangers opened up their minds to new possibilities.
The most exciting activities came next. The reader is asked to set an intention and focus on manifesting one desire within 48 hours. I focused on manifesting an opportunity to make money through my writing. Within 24 hours, I saw a Facebook ad for a free conference to help writers publish their book and make money from their book.
Another challenge involves consulting the universe for guidance by asking yes or no questions. I was wondering whether or not to get chickens this year. I have been wanting to get chickens for three years now. My friend, Meredith, was raising chics so this was the perfect year to do it. I had a barn stall so I didn't need to build a chicken coop. However, the guy who was supposed to build the chicken run kept coming to the house when I was out and, here's the kicker, Meredith e-mailed me to say that what she thought were chickens were roosters. I don't want a rooster, that answers my question. Easy peasy!
The sixth experiment involved planting rosemary and focusing only on the herbs on the right side of the planter. Once again, I got the girls involved and we sent positive vibes, sang to and, said compliments to the herbs on the right side. Guess which side grew taller, faster and thicker? I really enjoyed the next experiment, it involved losing weight. People used to bless their food. The premise is that when we eat mindlessly, our food doesn't have as much positive impact as it could on our body. You weigh yourself on Day 1 and focus on your food, thanking it for its nourishment and really savouring it. You weigh yourself at the end of Day 3. You should notice a tiny shift in your weight. I saw a four pound difference.
The eighth activity challenges the reader to send a message to someone telepathically in order to get a response from them. This was a no-brainer. My mother and I are totally connected. I was thinking of her and headed down the stairs to get the phone and call her. My intention was to ask her if she suddenly thought of me. However, before I could reach the bottom of the steps, the phone rang. Guess who was calling?
Last but not least, I focused on gratitude, writing all the blessings in my life. There was some movement as a result of this. I was waiting on answers from a few people. I had e-mailed them and hadn't heard back. The answers all came in on the same day like some hold button had been released.
You may not believe that your thoughts have any impact on your environment. You may think, like many others, that you are victim of circumstances. I have tried these experiments for myself. I challenge you to try any of these experiments and watch what happens. What have you got to lose?
Anne Walsh
www.artnsoul.org
Showing posts with label thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thoughts. Show all posts
Wednesday, 14 September 2016
Tuesday, 8 March 2016
Book of the Week-Happiness The Mindful Way: a practical guide by Ken A. Verni
March 5th, 2016
My husband gave me a gift card for Indigo books on Valentine's Day. I really want to be a more focused, grounded, mindful person so when I visited the Indigo store in Barrhaven, I was searching for a book on mindfulness. Some of you may be thinking, you don't need a book about mindfulness, just sit down, be quiet and listen to your breath. This is true but my brain is more receptive to information presented in books. I absorb the information and then I am able to apply it. So, I got a book.
Happiness the Mindful Way is a very thorough book. I chose it because, when I looked at the Table of Contents, I knew I would learn something new.
The book teaches the basics of mindfulness. You learn to switch from doing (which we do most of the time in our race to get everything crossed off our "to-do" lists) to being (as in present in this moment). Ken Verni talks about the importance of acknowledging our thoughts then learning to sweep them away with an imaginary broom. For children, he suggests imagining that they are cats watching a mouse hole, each thought that pops up is a mouse and must be swatted. I like that metaphor.
Next, he turns to emotions and explains that we can notice the emotion and allow it to pass through us without identifying with it. We accept it with compassion. He provides a variety of ways to deal with stress, recognizing triggers and patterns. He also examines our concept of happiness and warns us that we often define our happiness as achieving some fantasy that we project into the future. This prevents us from recognizing happiness in our current life.
Then we learned a variety of mindfulness meditation techniques from focusing on the breath, concentrating on an object, noticing sensations with our five senses, scanning our body, walking meditation, becoming a sturdy mountain and, my new favorite, loving kindness meditation.
I just had a very busy week, preparing for a workshop with 25 teenagers while translation a newsletter for the Canadian Art Therapy Association. I was having issues with technology. You may notice typos as I have been unable to switch my computer back to English. I was very stressed. I tried getting five minutes of mindful breathing into the start of my day and focusing on gratitude through my Gratitude Jar which I started in January. However, the most helpful thing I did was try Loving Kindness meditation.
You start by sitting comfortably and focusing on your breath then you think to yourself: "May I experience loving kindness for myself. May I enjoy happiness, health and peace". That's it, you just sit with these two sentences in your mind and breathe. I felt so much more positive and at peace. The goal is to then entend this wish to others starting with people you love the most, then acquaintances and finally, people you do not like. I used it when my husband was behaving in a way I did not understand. I sent him love and my feelings eased up. Can you imagine how much better our world would be (or, on a smaller scale, our community) if everyone practised this meditation on a daily basis?
Here are the most helpful tips I learned from this book:
You can be mindful anywhere (sitting in a chair, taking your shower, driving somewhere)
Intruding thoughts and strong emotions should not be repressed, embrace them and let them go
Send love to yourself as often as you can, it makes you a better person, more compassionate
Send love to others, including people you don't like, it releases you from the energy that bonds you to them.
Anne Walsh
www.artnsoul@ripnet.com
My husband gave me a gift card for Indigo books on Valentine's Day. I really want to be a more focused, grounded, mindful person so when I visited the Indigo store in Barrhaven, I was searching for a book on mindfulness. Some of you may be thinking, you don't need a book about mindfulness, just sit down, be quiet and listen to your breath. This is true but my brain is more receptive to information presented in books. I absorb the information and then I am able to apply it. So, I got a book.
Happiness the Mindful Way is a very thorough book. I chose it because, when I looked at the Table of Contents, I knew I would learn something new.
The book teaches the basics of mindfulness. You learn to switch from doing (which we do most of the time in our race to get everything crossed off our "to-do" lists) to being (as in present in this moment). Ken Verni talks about the importance of acknowledging our thoughts then learning to sweep them away with an imaginary broom. For children, he suggests imagining that they are cats watching a mouse hole, each thought that pops up is a mouse and must be swatted. I like that metaphor.
Next, he turns to emotions and explains that we can notice the emotion and allow it to pass through us without identifying with it. We accept it with compassion. He provides a variety of ways to deal with stress, recognizing triggers and patterns. He also examines our concept of happiness and warns us that we often define our happiness as achieving some fantasy that we project into the future. This prevents us from recognizing happiness in our current life.
Then we learned a variety of mindfulness meditation techniques from focusing on the breath, concentrating on an object, noticing sensations with our five senses, scanning our body, walking meditation, becoming a sturdy mountain and, my new favorite, loving kindness meditation.
I just had a very busy week, preparing for a workshop with 25 teenagers while translation a newsletter for the Canadian Art Therapy Association. I was having issues with technology. You may notice typos as I have been unable to switch my computer back to English. I was very stressed. I tried getting five minutes of mindful breathing into the start of my day and focusing on gratitude through my Gratitude Jar which I started in January. However, the most helpful thing I did was try Loving Kindness meditation.
You start by sitting comfortably and focusing on your breath then you think to yourself: "May I experience loving kindness for myself. May I enjoy happiness, health and peace". That's it, you just sit with these two sentences in your mind and breathe. I felt so much more positive and at peace. The goal is to then entend this wish to others starting with people you love the most, then acquaintances and finally, people you do not like. I used it when my husband was behaving in a way I did not understand. I sent him love and my feelings eased up. Can you imagine how much better our world would be (or, on a smaller scale, our community) if everyone practised this meditation on a daily basis?
Here are the most helpful tips I learned from this book:
You can be mindful anywhere (sitting in a chair, taking your shower, driving somewhere)
Intruding thoughts and strong emotions should not be repressed, embrace them and let them go
Send love to yourself as often as you can, it makes you a better person, more compassionate
Send love to others, including people you don't like, it releases you from the energy that bonds you to them.
Anne Walsh
www.artnsoul@ripnet.com
Sunday, 28 February 2016
Book of the Week-The Power
February 27th, 2016
I have been reading The Power by Rhonda Byrne because, when I was browsing the books available at the public library, its bright orange cover caught my eye. As I began reading this book, I recognized many of the concepts from The Secret: you have a choice every day whether to focus on the positive aspects of your life or not and, based on this decision, you will either get more positive experiences or negative ones. Whatever you give to others comes back to you so you need to be mindful of what you think, say and do to others. Your thoughts affect your feelings.
We think we are reacting to what has happened to us but the universe responds to us and our feelings are a strong magnet. Whatever we feel most intensely about is what will be increased in our life. There is no distinction between whether we are a good person or a bad person, whether this is a good feeling or a bad one. Strong feeling equals attraction. When you feel anger for someone, you are bringing more of them in your life because of the intensity of your feelings. She suggests noticing what you love and focusing on that. List the people, places, activities, objects you love, notice them in your environment and this is what will grow, opportunities to spend time with those people, visit those places or obtain these objects. Your feelings are a frequency like a radio station and you attract people and circumstances that match this frequency. I you want to bring different people and experiences in your life, adjust your frequency.
Rhonda explains that we are co-creators with the universe. We must be able to imagine what we want. What would it feel like to be this way, to do this, to have this? Once you are clear about what you want and what that would look like, you need to feel as though it were true. She encourages people to surround themselves with cues that their desires have manifested. If you want to go on a trip, you don't focus on the fact that you can'y afford it. Instead, you search the internet for hotels and save a few options on your Favourites page, you buy your swimsuit and sunglasses, you wear sunscreen every day so you smell like you are on holidays, you visualize the warm sand and salty sea air. You tell people how much you love that place and list everything you love about it. You may even print off a photo of your destination and stick it on your fridge. The possibility of going there feels more and more real. Your love for this place and your visualization become a magnet, drawing this experience closer to you.
I don't know if you ever watched Seinfeld. In one episode, George started a program to help reduce his stress. Whenever he had a negative thought, he would stop himself and repeat the words: Serenity Now. By the end of the episode he had a full on nervous breakdown. The author clarifies that there is no need to resist or fear negativity. You are not trying to suppress negative feelings, you just don't amplify them. You focus on what you want and what you love to increase your frequency so your energy matches your desires and you become a magnet for it. Negativity can exist but it doesn't dominate your thoughts, your are too busy imagining the positive outcomes. She describes an exercise to help you release your negative feelings. You imagine that each negative emotion is a wild horse that you climb onto and ride. Then you can choose to get off the horse.
Rhonda emphasizes that we are good enough now. We don't need to work harder, be skinnier, smarter, more of anything, we are fabulous as we are and life is our catalogue. We just need to choose what we want and keep loving it. If we concentrate on our lack, as in, "I would love to do that but I'm broke so it's never going to happen", then we are creating that story for our life, we associate bad feelings to that experience therefore we repel it. She warns against feeling envious of others who have achieved what we are striving to accomplish or feeling discouraged by our lack of results. These further associate negative feelings to our desires, placing them out of our reach.
In order to elevate your frequency, you need to feel as much love as possible for yourself, the people in your life and as many aspects of your life as possible. Gratitude is an expression of love so when you say thank you or you take time to acknowledge how important someone is to you, you are spreading love all around you. Life should be fun so if you focus on what you enjoy and spend time feeding your imagination with your desires while appreciating what you have, this is the key to success. This is true for money, health matters, work and relationships.
This is a feel-good book and it may seem a bit simplistic, just pick what you want from the catalogue, visualize it and send love to it and, presto, you get it. However, I do believe there is power in focusing on what you want, feeling it with every sense so you can imagine your life as it would be if your desires were manifested, watching your negative self-talk, writing down ten things you are grateful for each day and creating a vision board so you can visualize what your ideal life would look like. Is it all baloney? I will try it out and report back. Let's see what happens.
Anne Walsh
www.artnsoul.org
I have been reading The Power by Rhonda Byrne because, when I was browsing the books available at the public library, its bright orange cover caught my eye. As I began reading this book, I recognized many of the concepts from The Secret: you have a choice every day whether to focus on the positive aspects of your life or not and, based on this decision, you will either get more positive experiences or negative ones. Whatever you give to others comes back to you so you need to be mindful of what you think, say and do to others. Your thoughts affect your feelings.
We think we are reacting to what has happened to us but the universe responds to us and our feelings are a strong magnet. Whatever we feel most intensely about is what will be increased in our life. There is no distinction between whether we are a good person or a bad person, whether this is a good feeling or a bad one. Strong feeling equals attraction. When you feel anger for someone, you are bringing more of them in your life because of the intensity of your feelings. She suggests noticing what you love and focusing on that. List the people, places, activities, objects you love, notice them in your environment and this is what will grow, opportunities to spend time with those people, visit those places or obtain these objects. Your feelings are a frequency like a radio station and you attract people and circumstances that match this frequency. I you want to bring different people and experiences in your life, adjust your frequency.
Rhonda explains that we are co-creators with the universe. We must be able to imagine what we want. What would it feel like to be this way, to do this, to have this? Once you are clear about what you want and what that would look like, you need to feel as though it were true. She encourages people to surround themselves with cues that their desires have manifested. If you want to go on a trip, you don't focus on the fact that you can'y afford it. Instead, you search the internet for hotels and save a few options on your Favourites page, you buy your swimsuit and sunglasses, you wear sunscreen every day so you smell like you are on holidays, you visualize the warm sand and salty sea air. You tell people how much you love that place and list everything you love about it. You may even print off a photo of your destination and stick it on your fridge. The possibility of going there feels more and more real. Your love for this place and your visualization become a magnet, drawing this experience closer to you.
I don't know if you ever watched Seinfeld. In one episode, George started a program to help reduce his stress. Whenever he had a negative thought, he would stop himself and repeat the words: Serenity Now. By the end of the episode he had a full on nervous breakdown. The author clarifies that there is no need to resist or fear negativity. You are not trying to suppress negative feelings, you just don't amplify them. You focus on what you want and what you love to increase your frequency so your energy matches your desires and you become a magnet for it. Negativity can exist but it doesn't dominate your thoughts, your are too busy imagining the positive outcomes. She describes an exercise to help you release your negative feelings. You imagine that each negative emotion is a wild horse that you climb onto and ride. Then you can choose to get off the horse.
Rhonda emphasizes that we are good enough now. We don't need to work harder, be skinnier, smarter, more of anything, we are fabulous as we are and life is our catalogue. We just need to choose what we want and keep loving it. If we concentrate on our lack, as in, "I would love to do that but I'm broke so it's never going to happen", then we are creating that story for our life, we associate bad feelings to that experience therefore we repel it. She warns against feeling envious of others who have achieved what we are striving to accomplish or feeling discouraged by our lack of results. These further associate negative feelings to our desires, placing them out of our reach.
In order to elevate your frequency, you need to feel as much love as possible for yourself, the people in your life and as many aspects of your life as possible. Gratitude is an expression of love so when you say thank you or you take time to acknowledge how important someone is to you, you are spreading love all around you. Life should be fun so if you focus on what you enjoy and spend time feeding your imagination with your desires while appreciating what you have, this is the key to success. This is true for money, health matters, work and relationships.
This is a feel-good book and it may seem a bit simplistic, just pick what you want from the catalogue, visualize it and send love to it and, presto, you get it. However, I do believe there is power in focusing on what you want, feeling it with every sense so you can imagine your life as it would be if your desires were manifested, watching your negative self-talk, writing down ten things you are grateful for each day and creating a vision board so you can visualize what your ideal life would look like. Is it all baloney? I will try it out and report back. Let's see what happens.
Anne Walsh
www.artnsoul.org
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