Deliberate Receiving Page 15

  The third reason we keep going down a painful path rather than choose an easier one is, well, we’re simply not aware that it’s the more painful path. We have no idea how we really feel. Even when we later exclaim that we knew that this road wasn’t going to work out for us, we really didn’t have any awareness of it in the moment.

  Hearing the messenger

  By now you know that managing your vibration is the key to your manifested reality (getting the stuff you want), and your emotions are the key to your vibration. The emotion is the messenger, like a UPS delivery guy holding a package for you – a package containing the awareness of the limiting belief that’s been holding you back. All you really have to do is open the door and accept the package, and you do that by engaging with the emotion – you have to actually feel it, something that we have unfortunately been taught not to do. When the message has been delivered, the messenger will go away. If you try to ignore the messenger, it will knock harder and harder and will, eventually, break down your door. In other words, the negative emotion will get stronger and stronger, and (unwanted) manifestations will come in that trigger this emotion in ever more volatile ways, until you finally pay attention and sign for the damn package already. These messengers take their jobs very seriously. Emotions aren’t an intellectual construct, you are meant feel them. This is why you can’t just think your way out of this; you have to be willing to get your emotional hands dirty.

  When you ignore your negative emotions and larger manifestations (usually unknowingly), and this ignorance becomes automatic, you become unaware of how you’re feeling. This usually happens when a belief, which contradicts what you want (limiting belief) has been with you for a long, long time, and you’ve become so used to the discomfort it causes that you’re not even aware of it any more. This habitual unawareness is called ‘denial’.

  Denial is the act of unknowingly pretending to feel better than we actually do. In denial, we are not aware of how we are actually feeling.

  Denial actually helps you to stay stuck in a limiting belief, since it masks how you’re really feeling and therefore keeps you from being able to shift out of the emotional group you’re in. The good news is that if you pay attention to how you feel, you can’t be in denial. This is why emotional awareness is such a huge part of receiving the reality you want, even more so than understanding how the process works, which is incredibly helpful, but not strictly necessary – remember the toddler? If you could simply be completely aware of how you feel without judging those feelings, and therefore move in a direction that feels truly better, you’d be manifesting awesomeness in no time.

  The sticking point here is that when you are in denial, you don’t know it (and you don’t want to know it). While being aware of how you feel will force you to move out of denial, many people (and yes, even those that have been studying inner work for a long time) think that they feel one way, but actually feel another. The key to breaking out of denial is to pay attention to how you feel, not an intellectual representation of how you should feel. You have to stop overthinking it. In order to be truly honest with yourself about how you’re feeling, you have to be willing to actually experience your emotions.

  This is why it’s so important to accept that no part of the Spectrum is ‘bad’. If you demonize any part of the Spectrum, you will ‘deny’ any emotion you’re not happy with.

  The good news is that you can become aware of what’s actually in your vibration (whether or not you’re in denial about something) by looking at what’s manifesting in your reality. You can pretend to feel better all you want, you can use pretty words, but you can’t lie to the cosmic mirror because it will reflect your actual vibration back to you no matter what. If you think you’re feeling pretty good, but your reality is filled with tons of crap you don’t want, you’re in denial. Don’t worry; just about everyone is to some degree.

  Think of denial as a kind of numbness to certain limiting beliefs, like a callus you’ve formed on your big toe so you won’t feel the pebble in your shoe any more. This is a fine system, unless you go for a walk. When you engage in an activity that activates the irritating factor – in this cases the pebble rubbing against your toe, the point will come at which the denial (the callus) won’t be enough any more. The pebble will eventually cause a blister, then a bigger blister that, if left unattended, will burst open and bleed and hurt and become infected and may even lead to the amputation of your foot. In other words, the problem (the unwanted manifestations) will get bigger and more painful, until you finally do something about it (like take the freaking pebble out of your shoe), or the situation kind of blows up and resolves itself (you go to the hospital and get your gangrenous foot chopped off).

  If you’re aware of how you feel, however, you’ll notice the irritation from the pebble early on, and will be able to take it out of your shoe before any real damage is done. If you miss the initial irritation, you could still take note of that blister on your toe at the end of the day, search your shoe for a pebble and take it out. Our goal is always to find that pesky pebble as early as possible. So, even if you’re in denial, meaning you don’t feel the initial irritation, being aware of how you feel will, eventually, lead you to discover some evidence of your discomfort. And you don’t have to wait until it’s foot-chopping-off time, either.

  Becoming aware of how you feel requires you to do three things:

  Make some space. Distraction is denial’s best friend. If you’re constantly busy, you won’t be able to ‘hear’ your messengers. You’ll be so distracted that you won’t have a chance to become aware of how you really feel. Take some time out to just sit and feel. Don’t read, don’t watch TV, don’t eat, don’t do anything. Just sit and feel. As little as 15 minutes a day of making space will make a huge difference. The more uncomfortable this exercise is for you, the more in denial you are.

  Embrace ALL emotions. As long as you consider any emotional reaction to be inappropriate, you’ll shut down the ‘uglier’ and more volatile ones, keeping you stuck in denial. It’s not wrong to be angry with your kids. This doesn’t make you a bad parent. It’s not wrong to hate your parents. These are emotions that are telling you something, not reflections of what kind of person you are. Demonizing any emotion is the equivalent of barricading the door so the delivery guy can’t give you that message. Also, remember that your emotional reaction is always about you, not whoever triggered it. Your anger at your kids isn’t about them. They were just the helpful angels that pointed it out to you by wrecking your freshly cleaned kitchen. So don’t shy away from any emotion out of guilt. Embrace it and receive the message.

  Remember that your situation CAN change. Often, we don’t allow ourselves to acknowledge how we’re really feeling because we don’t think there’s anything we can do to change our situation. After all, who wants to be aware of their gangrenous toe, if there’s nothing they can do about the pain? If you believe there’s no way you can get a better job, that all jobs are just as sucky, for example, then what’s the point in acknowledging that you hate your job? Remind yourself that there are many options that you’re not currently seeing. Also remember that just because you’re not aware of the pain, that doesn’t mean it’s not affecting you negatively. Denial takes a lot of energy to maintain.

  The key to your vibration

  Hopefully by now you should be starting to understand how your emotional awareness is the key to becoming aware of your current vibration, so that you can change it and manifest something else. If you truly want to receive the reality you desire, if you want to change your life for the better, if you want to project a different frequency so your hologram can mirror back a different reality to you, you’ll have to be willing to go the feeling route. Fortunately, this isn’t actually hard. Why would it be? This feedback system is part of the game’s design and the game is designed to be effortless.

  Do you have trouble recognizing when you’re hungry? Probably not. This is how easy it is to recognize how you’re fe
eling. Now, you may have suppressed your hunger for so long that you no longer feel it until you get weak and shaky. But if you became just a little more aware, if you started looking for the early signs of hunger (in this case, signs of weakness), you’d be able to catch them earlier and earlier and the mechanism would come back. It’s the same with your emotions.

  You may not be aware of your emotional feedback at the earliest of stages (and even if you are, you probably don’t trust it enough to base your decisions on it), but you are aware of what’s currently not working in your life. You’re aware of your manifestations and/or their absence. You’ll either have manifested something that you don’t like (someone yelling at you at work, for example), or you’ll be aware of something that you want which is ‘missing’ from your reality (like not having a romantic partner when you really, really want one). You can use this information to manifest what you want, as soon as you figure out what that really is…

  Becoming aware of what you want

  In Chapter 4, I introduced you to the Progression of a Manifestation, which showed how a manifestation goes from being a non-physical concept to being observable in your physical reality. Stage 1 of that Progression requires you to focus on what you want, but in order to do that you first have to figure out what that is. Now, I know that for many of you this will seem like a no-brainer. But you might be surprised to learn that most people actually fall off the proverbial horse at this stage. They either can’t figure out what they want because they’ve only ever spent time identifying what they don’t want, or they think they’re focusing on WHAT they want, when they’re actually focusing on HOW they think it has to come about.

  Figuring out what you truly want isn’t that hard when you understand the concepts of focus and progression (which you now do!), as well as the value of the unwanted (which you’re about to).

  One of the easiest ways to figure out what you want is first to figure out what you don’t want. What are you complaining about? What do you not like about the situation you’re in? Since most people have a much easier time and a hell of a lot more practice focusing on what they don’t want than what they do, this step is usually incredibly easy. Identify what you’ve been bitching about and then use that to determine what you’d like instead.

  This is actually the value of the unwanted stuff in your reality (also often called ‘contrast’, because it allows you to have contrasting experiences from which you can then choose). It’s there to help you identify what it is that you want, spawning new desires. This unwanted crap you’ve been complaining about all your life is actually an integral and very necessary part of the game. Think of it this way: You’re in your holographic room and it’s completely empty. It’s just a blank slate. You now want to create a fabulous piece of art from scratch. It could be anything, but it must be fabulous. Oh, and you can’t revise it; whatever you come up with on your first try must meet the fabulous requirement. Go ahead, try and picture your piece of art now. It’s not that easy, is it? Would you be able to come up with the exact version of what you want, from scratch? Or would you spend a lot of time staring blankly into the white room, paralysed by the infinite choices?

  Now, imagine that there already was a piece of art in the room, one that you could turn into something fabulous. You have the ability to make changes, and you can keep on revising the art until you’re satisfied. So, you see that it’s kind of small, which allows you to decide that you’d like something bigger (and as you decide this, it just happens). The art is green, but you don’t like green, so you decide to make it purple. It’s a sculpture but you’d rather have a painting. You look at each characteristic and decide if you like it or not, and if not, what you’d like instead. In this way, your piece of art gets more and more fabulous (to you) over time. Are you beginning to see how the second scenario is much more efficient?

  Designing reality from scratch is hard. There’s simply too much choice. Changing a reality that’s already there is far, far easier. When you have a starting point full of some stuff you like and some stuff you’d like to improve upon, and you can just keep on making improvements into perpetuity, creating the reality you want becomes a cinch. The unwanted stuff in your reality isn’t just there to help you identify when you’re focusing on what you don’t want (by giving something unwanted to focus on). It’s mainly there to help you figure out what you DO want, in ever-greater detail. Unwanted manifestations can be anything from something truly devastating in your reality to a detail that could be just a tad more awesome. All of it is there as a representation of what you’re focusing on (even unknowingly), as well as to help you identify what you’d like to focus on instead. Let me repeat that in another, blunter way:

  The unwanted crap in your reality is there to help you figure out what you want, and if you use it as such, it will go away. The only reason it ever sticks around and multiplies is because you insist on focusing on and bitching about it.

  But, this is also why using what you don’t want is the easiest way to start figuring out what you do want. It’s actually designed to be that way. If, for example, you don’t like your crappy, soul-sucking job, you could list all the reasons that you hate it. Let’s list a few hypothetical examples:

  My boss is a giant butthead.

  He micromanages me.

  He yells at people.

  I feel unappreciated at work.

  My co-workers are idiots.

  I have no say in any decisions.

  The people at the top are idiots.

  My co-workers are also lazy.

  I get the most difficult clients.

  They make horrible demands that I can’t meet.

  So, you have a pretty specific-seeming list of what it is that you don’t like about your job, which can help you figure out what you want instead. You can’t just simply state the opposite of these manifestations, however. That won’t get you very far. You could affirm, ‘My boss is awesome! My co-workers are awesome! My clients are awesome!’ all day long, but it wouldn’t shift any energy at all. Why not?

  You cannot shift your perspective from the unwanted to the wanted unless you back off and take a broader view. Remember the analogy with the telescope in Chapter 4 – you can’t just swing that sucker around while focusing narrowly on the words on that computer screen. But, if you take a step back, look at the buildings and then find a different building before narrowing it down to a certain floor and window and desk, you’ll find the target (frequency) you’re looking for in no time. You can ‘back off’ in real life, by identifying the emotion that each one of these unwanted manifestations elicits from you and then finding the positive emotion you’d like to feel instead.

  The statements in our list could come from several different emotional groups. For example, a person in DEPRESSION would make these statements from a place of total powerlessness, just accepting that this is how things are. A person in SHAME focuses on how everything was really their own fault (‘my boss micromanages me because I make mistakes. My co-workers may be idiots, but it’s really down to me to make it all work.’) A person in ANGER would make these statements defiantly (‘My boss micromanages me, but he has no reason to. I could be doing so much better if my co-workers and clients weren’t idiots!’). Are you beginning to see why working strictly with words, without acknowledging the emotions they represent in each case, doesn’t work? The words alone don’t tell you where you are on the Spectrum.

  For the sake of this example, let’s say that you made this list from a place of ANGER. You’re fed up with your job and you want out. You resent the hell out of your boss. You don’t feel appreciated, you don’t feel trusted and you don’t feel successful (because you’re not allowed to be). You’ve established how you really feel. Congratulations. Notice that in order to do that, you had to be honest about how you were feeling; you couldn’t pretend it was ‘fine’, when it clearly wasn’t. A lot of people who have been attempting to work with the Law of Attraction deliberately, will make the mistak
e of trying to feel better about a situation without first figuring out what their current emotional state is. So, they make a list of all the positive qualities of their boss and co-workers before they’ve acknowledged what’s actually bothering them. Can this work? Yes, IF this technique was the right one for where the person was on the Spectrum. But it won’t necessarily bring about real, physical change if it fails to shift the vibration that’s actually holding them back. Don’t give your power to techniques. Techniques are nothing but tools, and you have to know what the problem is before you can choose the tool that will help you fix it.

  Now that you’ve identified how you feel, it’s time to determine how you WANT to feel. If you don’t want to feel unappreciated, for example, you clearly want to feel appreciated, instead. You want to feel trusted. You want to feel satisfied and successful and free to make decisions. Again, this may seem like a really simple exercise (and it is, it’s all meant to be simple), but you’d be surprised how many people have never taken the time to figure out what it is they want instead of the stuff they spend all day complaining about. Remember not to get specific (remember the telescope analogy!). Don’t try to visualize the actual workplace with a nice boss and awesome co-workers just yet (unless doing so feels really, really good. You can always focus on whatever feels really, really good). Instead, just sit with the feelings you want to feel for a few minutes. Do this even if you’ve already decided that you think you know what you want.