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Your assignment this Labor Day holiday weekend, should you choose to accept it, is to look for beauty.
What does beauty mean to you? Does something have to be complex, like an intricate sculpture, to be beautiful? Or, is it the most simple of things that we find in our field of awareness that create a sense of beauty?
There are plenty of definitions out there. Ignore them. Trust your instincts. Where do your eyes linger? What sounds cause pleasure? When does a touch define beauty? There are no right answers. No special preparation required. The awareness of beauty is a prescription for calm and connection to a great and magnificent universe.
With this on your mind, see how often appreciation of beauty peeks into your consciousness this weekend.
If you have been following the exercise and doing the steps along with me, you have had a few days to complete and think about your dream board. Here is the final part of this exercise.
4. Place your Dream Board in a location that you will see frequently. Think of someplace that you will see everyday and as often as possible. I think there is extra power in having you Dream Board someplace where you will see it easily before you go to sleep and first thing when you wake. Our minds are fresh and receptive as we creep in or out of our relaxed dream state.
Take a picture of your dream board. If you have a mobile phone with a camera, use it. Keep this picture with you. Throughout your day, look at your dream board and the picture of your dream board as often as possible. When you look at it, imagine yourself in that picture and living those dreams.
Your Dream Board can change over time as well. It can evolve as you accomplish your dreams and choose to add new ones. It can become even more defined, as you think of ways to be even more specific in identifying your desires. It is OK to add or subtract elements over time.
Enjoy your Dream Board and enjoy this step towards manifesting all sort of wonderful things in life.
Have you worked on your Dream Board? If so, how was the process? Was it fun, challenging, clarifying?
If you followed the steps, I hope you are feeling a sense of accomplishment. You have created a unique representation of your dream life. We will conclude with Pt. 4 of the exercise in my next post.
I hope you are following along with the Dream Board exercise and enjoying it so far. Now you should have a collection of pictures, photos, words, objects or anything else that represents your eight items. That’s five things you want to manifest and three that you already have in your life.
3. Get a nice sized piece of heavy duty paper, poster board or foam board. I am using a 24″x18″ piece of foam core board myself. But, use whatever size is comfortable and will fit your items.
You will need glue or some other adhesive to put the items you have collected on your board. I would encourage you to mix up you items on the board and not have items from one list gathered together.
Play with the layout. Be creative. There is no one right way to do this. Follow your intuition. When it feels right to you, begin to affix everything to the board. It is also fun to add decorative items like gold stars or stickers, that feel good to you and enhance what you have on the board.
Does anything on the board have a photograph of you on it? If not, find a picture of you that you especially like and add it to the board.
Now, you should have all of your items on the board. How does it look? Is there something that clearly and specifically represents your list of items? Are the items on the board specific enough to represent your dreams and desires? If not, add to and adjust your Dream Board.
Are you all done with this step? Great! You now have a personal and special tool to help speed you along on your process to achieve your desires. The next post will go into some more detail on what to do now that you have created this Dream Board and how to use it. For now, enjoy your very special creation.
Here is pt. 2 of the Dream Board exercise.
2. By now, you should have before you two lists. One list has five items you have chosen as the situations or things you desire to create in your life. Look at this list again and see if there are any items that you can make even more specific. If so, add those specifics to the descriptions.
Your second list should consist of three items that you are grateful for in your life. These are examples of what you have already helped to create and manifest.
Now, here is an especially fun part. Look at magazines, Internet websites, photographs, or anything else you can find that can represent your items on these two lists. It is also time to get some art supplies. Can’t find a picture that looks like that dream house of yours on the beach? You can draw it, or use words on paper to describe in. While you do this , try to imagine yourself as a child doing this part of the exercise. In other words, be creative and think outside of the box. Want a smoking hot body? Find the picture from a magazine that looks like what you would like to become. Cut it out and paste a photo of your face on top. That is how creative I am asking you to be.
Have fun and take your time to do this part. Begin to find, cut out, print, write, paint, draw, and create images that represent what you have on your two lists. For the things you already have, like that great spouse for example, use a picture that you have.
There is one other thing to keep in mind here. This exercise can be as personal as you like. How much you share its content with others is up to you. If you have a strong desire that resonates with you, don’t limit yourself because you may be embarrassed by it if someone else were to see. if you desire it and it resonates with you, and does not harm anyone in the process, then you deserve it.
In the next step we will use this collection to create our dream board.
This is the first of a series of posts that will take you through the exercise in creating a visible and tangible vision of your dream life. Let’s call it the Dream Board exercise.
If you read many books about the law of attraction, you have come across similar exercises. There is a reason you see variations of this so often. It’s because there is a certain amount of success that occurs as a result of completing them. You may find my exercise has a bit of a twist from the typical law of attraction exercise you’ve tried of this type.
I will walk you through the creation of a Dream Board. And as you do this, I will be creating a new Dream Board for myself. So, over the next few days, let’s enjoy this.
1. Think about your dream life and distill your thoughts into a list. This can be done quickly, if you intuitively know exactly what you want or if you have been thinking about what you desire for a while yet.
If you are not sure of what you want or have a vague or general concept of your dream life, give yourself the opportunity to brainstorm and explore a bit. Perhaps, you want to live on a tropical island. Before you begin this exercises, you need to flesh this out some more. Where is this Island? What is your life like on this island? What sort of house do you live in? Who are you with on the island? How do you spend your day? What does the view look like from your front door? The goal is to get as specific as possible.
So, find a comfortable place to write and brainstorm, or “use the flow technique”, as my favorite coach, Eva Liljendahl might reccomend (check out the link to her site). Sit and write, write fast. Begin with the thought; my dream life is…
Then write and allow yourself to write unedited and uninterrupted for 10 minutes. When you are through, look at what you wrote. Are there any specifics on that list that you would like to explore? Are there any items that you can work with and make them more specific?
However you get to it, create a list of five specific items that you would like to create as your dream life.
As an example, here is one of mine: My novel, “Magnolia Carpet” is on the New York Times bestseller list for forty three weeks. (I’ll write more about my novel in a future posting.)
So, what are your five items? Allow yourself plenty of time to pick five things that are specific and feel in alignment to your dream life.
Now, here is another list I would like you to create. Create a list of things that you are grateful for in your life. These are things that you are pleased with, satisfied with, are in alignment with your dream life and already exist. For instance, do you have a great relationship with your spouse, wonderful and supportive family, great health, a terrific friend? Write down as many as come to mind.
You should now have two lists, one that represents what you desire, narrowed down to five items, and one that represents great circumstances that already exist. Take this second list and narrow it down to three items. Any three will do for now. By the way, this second list shows the power of manifestation and creation that you already have. Look at this list for reminders of the great things you have attracted into your life.
That is all for step one. You will use these two important lists that we will use to create a Dream Board. In pt.2, we will begin to put those lists to work for us. Stay tuned.
If you are anything like me, you are interested and inundated with information about the upcoming Presidential election. I must confess, despite my advice to limit exposure to the news media, I find myself especially interested in politics. As much as I notice on television, radio, newspapers, or blogs, people talking about the election, I especially notice how politics raises its head in everyday conversations around me.
Depending on how close someone is to you, you may get a hint of their favorite candidate, which may or may not be one of our most likely two choices. And once discussions begin, they can often get emotional and heated, with strong opinions on one way or another. Often these converstaions have more to do with our own sense of wanting to be right and trying to defend that perspective.
Let me just say one thing that is extremely simple and pointed. It is something I believe deep in my soul, despite having my own preference for President. And, No, I am not telling you who that is. One reason I am not telling is, that it it really doesn’t matter.
OK, I said it. It doesn’t matter who wins the election. And, I mean it in this way. We will be fine, no matter who wins. You will be fine whether it is McCain or Obama that wins the contest. Now, maybe about right now, you are creating a list of reasons why I am wrong, and why this election is so important. On one hand, you are right. So, if you want to be right, keep making your list. If you want to live a fulfilled life, decide that you will do just that regardless of the outcome of the election. And, you will do just that. You will be just fine no matter who is president.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article by Todd G. Buchholz on pg W9 called “The Great Depression Hoax”. It outlined point by point how so much of the recent economic bad news is actually relatively mild, if even bad at all. He does this with statistics and facts. But, as the article points out, the media often takes such facts and attaches catastrophic negative descriptions to them. He also makes a case for the positive nature of people and individual success. So, if you need a does of something to counteract the latest news story out there, you might want to look a little deeper for good news stories like these.
Today’s Chicago Tribune also had a headline Saturday about the good news of the U.S. Dollar getting stronger. It is an under reported economic change that has occurred lately.
I still believe in a selective diet when it comes to news. But, stories like these show that there is always some good news out there if we have the perspective to find it.
The theme I wrote about yesterday continues, namely connecting with people from my past.
Today I ran into a doctor I used to work with. Though we live in the same city, we had lost touch and have not seen each other for ten years. This afternoon, walking into a local University for a meeting, he notices me as I walk out, and says hello. We give each other a hug.
Also, another long time ago, former colleague happens to be at the same meeting and walks up behind me saying, “I recognize the back of your head.” I’m not sure that the back of my head is so recognizable, but one big hug later, I was glad that she did recognize it. So, this week has been one of reconnecting with people from my past. In each case, I realize, it was the other person that saw or contacted me first.
Tonight as I get ready for bed, I wonder who I will run into next. I will think of someone I have been wanted to hear from and envision it. Let’s see what happens. Do you have any old friends that you would like to connect with?
Earlier this week, I met a friend at a tea shop I had never been too. It is about three miles from my house, a place I have walked by before, unassuming and part of the texture of this city block full of shops and cafes. I spent maybe two hours there, and had some nice conversation. But, what I noticed was a series of little connections with people on the fringes of my life, all loosely related to this brief time at the shop.
First, while sitting outside and sipping my mint iced tea, a woman jogs by and calls out my name. I turn to see it is someone I recognize. I can’t place exactly who she is. But, clearly she knew me, and she looked familiar. As I left to walk home, I received a message on my phone from a friend in Tokyo who I had not heard from in months. Then, the next morning, at my local Starbucks, the manager introduces himself to me and says, “I saw you last night at the tea shop. I tried to say hello. Maybe you didn’t see me.” I hadn’t. Later that day, I get a call from someone I work with telling we that she ran into the woman who jogged by me. She was another person I hadn’t seen or talked to in months. s
I don’t know exactly the meaning of these connections. I don’t know why they seemed to revolve around this tea shop, or why it involved the people it did. I do know that something about it all felt positive and energizing. It was a synchronistic experience. Oh, and the mint tea was pretty good too.
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