Friday, November 13, 2020

To Infinity and Beyond

 

Have you noticed that some days pert along, things are working, and you’re on a roll, and then there are other days… 

 

The odd thing is, on up days, you keep rolling along like a bike on a slight incline. On a down day, you roll like a marble in one of those funnels where it spirals down until it disappears into a hole at the bottom of the funnel.

 

The Law of Momentum.

 

We have another “Law,” The Law of Attraction, which is a term I hesitate to use. You know how you find something, and you get excited like you’re the first person to notice. Then another person sees it, and you’re happy to have company. Yet, sometimes it becomes so well-known that it gets shot at, diluted, misunderstood, or ridiculed.

 

And then you feel like someone told you your baby is ugly.

 

Ronda Byrne shared what she had found regarding this Law of Attraction with her movie, The Secret.  Many people have benefitted from applying what they learned from the film, but I believe while it was a wonderful hors d’oeuve, it was not not the entire meal. 

 

However, it introduced to the world an old concept that successful people through the ages have used, and that sages tried to tell us about.

 

The ingredients have been whispered to us since the beginning of time. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us…” Think about it. (Whoever wrote Genesis didn’t know about a man named Jesus.)

 

All along, philosophers, writers, sages, and mystics had a piece of this mystery of space, time, brain, magnetism, and chemistry. “Ask, and you shall receive. Seek, and you shall find.” “Think and Grow Rich.” “As a man thinkith.” “He who has ears let him hear.” “If you can see it in your mind, you can hold it in your hand.” And Albert Einstein chimed in with, “Imagination is a preview of coming attractions.”

 

The principles are all over the place when you become attuned to them. It’s like the drawing, “Find 100 hidden birds.” You look and find one, and then, low and behold, there is one drawn in the clouds, one in the limbs of the tree, another in the roof shingles. Pretty soon, you find all 100 birds. Ta-Da!

 

“It’s what I ask for,” says one. “It’s my attitude,” says another. “My emotional state creates,” someone contributes. “It’s my subconscious giving me what I want.” some say. “It’s a bad hair day,” someone else says. “Life happens.”

 

Don’t you feel your energy spiraling down?

 

Sort of like now with this damn Corona19 virus thing. Sometimes the world gets thrown into chaos, and we must dig our way out. 

 

Yet, we wonder, “Are we magnets walking around in a sea of other magnets, attracting this, repelling that, wondering what in the heck is happening?” And don’t you hate it when someone says, “What did you do to attract that?” Well, if I was in control of my Attracting, I wouldn’t attract you to ask me that.”

 

Yet you hear the whisper, don’t you? You feel it reverberate in your bones. There is something to it. You know something exists but you don’t know how to implement it.

 

The interviewees in The Secret introduced the concept to the masses—or tried to.

 

What if the Secret works all the time? What if we are always attracting, repelling, asking, for, and railing against. We create without effort or thinking, That’s the reason we get crap sometimes.

 

 “I want a new Alexis,” you say. “Ha, says another part of your conscious, you can’t afford an Alexis.” Bam, there goes your Alexis.

 

One fellow who is into this Law of Attraction says to keep all negativity out of your house. And to be careful with your speech. Speech is even more potent than thought.

 

I better stop swearing.

 

“Create your own Universe as you go along.” said Winston Churchill.

 

Some people think this Law of Attraction is magic. You ask, you receive, that’s it. If you don’t get what you want, you think it’s not working. Sometimes it does work like magic. Other times it comes in little spirits. You have a thought about something you would like to fix or manifest. Then another creative idea joins it, and another, until Viola! You get it.

 

I need to take some action.

.  

Notice that the last part of Attraction is action. Musicians know this, they practice, then aim for the gig.

 

How do you describe a state of mind? What are the thoughts rattling around in our brain? Sunshine and light? Being positive all the time?  “That’s not being realistic,” say some.   

 

That’s the reason it doesn’t work.

 

I think the attraction genie loves exuberance and happy thoughts, and decides to jump in and contribute. You know how we are attracted to the group having fun.

 

Here’s to happy thoughts,

Jo

 

Hey, maybe it’s ok to swear sometimes. It clears the pipes.

 

 

 

In Our Back Yard:

Some critter is stacking in the winter groceries—my chickens. I lost two. I loved having them free-range, and we had a nice strip of grass behind the Wayback, our auxiliary building. However, the fence there is chain-link and not secure for climbing or burrowing chicken-eating critters. At night the chickens liked to roost on the fence. I guess they looked like sitting ducks, uh, luscious hens. Two of my hens became dinner.

Husband dear and I spent this evening shoring up the chicken yard for the remaining three hens. One is of my original three I’ve had since babies. The other two are my adoptees Blackie, and Red, who showed up and stayed. Last night before I locked them in their little chicken house, Blackie jumped up on the top rail of the eight-foot chicken yard fence and made it through an opening in the bird netting.

From the 2 x 4 boarded top of the yard, she jumped onto the Wayback’s roof and over to the Tiny house. She spent the night roosting on the roof’s ridge.

 

That girl has self-preservation.

 

Tonight, all three are locked in their house.



Saturday, November 7, 2020

Think Different

 A few nights ago, I got out of bed at 1:11, unable to sleep. I shuffled through the house, found my phone in the dark--that’s where I read my Kindle books--and slipped my “Smart Blanket” over my head, ready to snuggle in and put my feet into the foot holders at the bottom of the fleecy blanket. I was hungry, so I sliced a bit of Dill Havarti cheese, placed a few rice crackers on the cutting board, (see, you can walk around in that Smart Blanket), and poured myself a glass of wine all by the light of the phone. 

 I made it into the living room carrying my stash, sat myself and the cutting board down, and then proceeded to sit the wine glass into mid-air, missing the coffee table altogether.

The carpeting cushioned the glass from breaking and absorbed the wine—a good thing it was white wine, not red.

 I threw a towel over the wine wet spot to absorb it, mashed it around with my foot, and settled into what I intended in the first place.

 “When you grow up,” I read, “you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and you ought to just live your life inside that world. 

 Try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

 That’s a very limited life. It can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you was made up of people that were no smarter than you. And that you can change it. You can build your own things that people can use. - Steve Jobs

 Think Different

 -- Apple’s slogan from 1992 to 2002

I didn’t know that.

 One advantage of a Kindle is that it has links, and that night, although I rarely do, I hit one and found Steve Jobs' commentary. 

 I was reading Building a Brand by David Miller, the best book on copy-writing if you’re into that, or marketing if you have a company or even write a letter. Marketing is something we do whether we know we’re doing it or not. I always run from it, thinking I stunk at it (or is it stank?), and it scares me, 

 Once Jobs wrote a nine-page description of his company, very technical, but after his experience with Pixar and seeing the value of story, he switched from being focused on his company to being focused on his customers. Most customers don’t want to waste calories on reading a lengthy description of your company. They want to know how it will serve them. “Think Different” was born. And Jobs wanted Different to be a noun instead of “differently” which is grammatically correct.

 “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

--Flannery O’Connor

 Yep. I know that one. 

 But if you want a great resolve, think of Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars Movie. He did it with one shot.

  • “Do I have what it takes?” In his case, to be a Jeti.
  • He got the job done--destroyed the Death Star.
  •  Good triumphed over evil.

 

 

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The Heart-Brain Connection

                     Bless the firefighters--this is so cool.

 Heart-Brain Connection

 

I have to know more about this.

 

How long have we believed that the body is controlled by the brain? 

 

Everybody knows that, right?

 

What if we’re wrong?

 

What if we are controlled by the heart, and our poor brain just can’t get the message?

 

What if the heart is trying to make us happy while the poor brain tries to keep us alive?

 

 “Happy? Smappy,” the brain says. “You don’t need to be happy. You need to stay alive as long as you can and reproduce as many offspring as possible. That’s biology. That’s what life is.”

 

But, dear brain, humankind has longed for happiness since it first stepped foot on the planet. Why is there such a yearning for a happy life? Why is there such a search for meaning, for the divine, for transcendental experiences?

 

“Danged if I know,” says the brain.

 

The brain appears intent on suffering. More precisely, it loves the known. And, not only does it want to stay there, it wants our consciousness to stay there as well.

 

 Why do we spend 95% of our waking hours in unconscious reminiscing?

 

Okay, you decide to break the cycle and sit down to meditate.

 

But as you begin to transcend into the unknown, your brain senses a disruption in the force. It ramps up suffering to bring you back down. Suddenly you’re flooded with anxious thoughts: all those bills to pay, you revisit that horrid picture of an animal suffering you saw yesterday, you remember that unkind thing you said. This is normal. Anxiety is a primary human function. Meditation is a way of making peace with your anxiety, and the brain wants nothing to do with it.

 

Dr. Joe Dispenzia calls the brain an artifact of the past, but really the whole body is. It’s a history book written in our cells. And history has seldom been kind, so there we are left with debris in our cells.

 

I have heard the phrase, “Follow your heart,” many times, but I’ve never heard anyone tell me to follow my brain.  

 

Dispenzia says that the heart is mainly magnetic, while the brain is electrical. The poor dears don’t know how to talk to each other. But we’re learning, aren’t we?

 

 

 

Now, dear ones who read my blogs on vision training and were kind enough to ask for more. I wrote the following small book (8,000 words) for you. Some of the material will be familiar to you, some will be new. All will be sent with many thanks for sending me down this trail. 

 

 


Hello Beautiful: The Art and Science of Vision Training Using the Bates Method is available on Amazon Kindle. Free for Kindle Unlimited, $2.99 to buy.

 

For more description and the Introduction, please go to https://jewellshappytrails.com