Here’s the deal. At 19 I thought I was doing my mom a favor whenever I worked up a smile on my face. (look ma’ I can smile!) Later on I thought I was humoring my life-coach by being a good client and following her advice to look for the positive side of things. (look coach, I can reframe!) But after reading Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting and learning about the Law of Attraction, I now know that I am the one who stands to benefit the most – not my mom or my coach – from looking for ways to feel happy, no matter what.
WHAT in the universe is the Law of Attraction?
Note: for some this might take some mind-bending.
My intention in sharing this with you is not to question any scientific theory or to support Quantum Physics. Instead I intend to make your life (and mine) better by applying some simple logic.
According to the Law of Attraction, like attracts like. Which means that positive attracts positive and negative attracts negative. Yes, I know, according to my 9th grade physics teacher, and to Coulomb’s Law, it’s opposites that attract. So that would mean that negative attracts positive and vice versa. But open your mind (and put your physics book down) and think about the following. Have you, when you’ve been in a positive mood, feeling great, willingly sought to be with a negative person? For example at a party, when you’ve been having a blast, have you gone to hang-out with the party pooper in the corner? My guess is that your answer will be a resounding NO WAY because you much rather be with your friends who are also jumping up and down feeling great just like you. I’ll make this more relevant to your work-life. If you look close enough at how your colleagues at work gather at lunch-time, it’s very likely that you’ll notice that all the complainers and whiners tend to sit at the same table. I can speak for myself that when I was working within an organization in corporate Australia, I made it a point to avoid negative people as if they were a plague.
Now do you see what I mean? Negative people definitely repel positive ones and positive ones attract positive ones.
Following that same logic, in order to attract more positive into our lives, we MUST feel positive. Simply put, according to the Law of Attraction, we emit energy of the physical kind through how we feel. Positive feelings, like when we’re feeling excited and happy, emit positive energy. Negative feelings, like when we’re feeling frustrated or bummed, emit negative energy. It follows that based on how we feel, positively or negatively, we attract either type of energy into our lives. Got it? (read that one more time if you’re like me and need to know how things work before you jump into action)
And that’s exactly why it’s in your best interest (and mine) to feeel* positive – to attract positive things.
I’m not suggesting that we need to be fake – and pretend to feel happy even when the going gets tough. To begin with there’s a time to feel down. Like when a parent passes away or when s*** happens, of the real kind. Feeling down at times means that you’re human – and that’s a great thing. But also, pretending, according to the Law of Attraction will not do the trick simply because to emit the energy you must feel it. On the other hand, intending to feel a certain way will in fact get you to shift your energy. Based on that, the key is to allow yourself to be in that down state for as little as you possibly can because quite simply, being down, although is part of the human condition, doesn’t solve anything. Worse yet, it attracts more negative things. In other words, when we remain in a negative state, emitting negative energy, we run the great risk of attracting into our lives more of what is making us feel sad, frustrated, angry.
So the trick is to say to yourself – “fine, it’s okay for me to feel down, but how can I get out of this state ASAP?”
Inspired by my new-found knowledge and determined to attract all the good that the universe has stored for me, I’ve decided to spend the next 30 days (okay 27 cause I started on Saturday) feeeling happy NO matter what!
Because I’d LOVE for you to join me, here I share with you exactly what I’ve been doing.
How in the universe can you feeel happy NO matter what!?
Since I started trying to keep up my positive feeling, I’ve noticed that I’m really good at focusing on what I don’t want in life. For example, while I was driving to the gym this morning, a driver turned unexpectedly into my lane and bam, I felt my anger rising. And just like that, at the snap of a finger, my energy went from positive to negative.
So step 1 in getting rid of negative energy in my life is to shift my focus from what I DON’T want to what I DO want. To do that, whenever I feel a negative emotion, like anger or frustration or anxiety, I simply observe myself get angry, frustrated or anxious and then when my temper tantrum is over, I ask myself: “What is it that I do want from this?”
In this all too common situation in my life, here’s my wish list: I’d like for my driving not to be interrupted by clueless drivers! I’d like for the world to be free of clueless drivers! And I’d like the flow of positive energy to continue in my life, uninterrupted by clueless drivers. So I see, I want to feel good. Aha! There it is. That’s my clue.
If I want to feel good, then why don’t I just feel good? Duh! (I can almost hear you saying). Because a clueless driver just crossed my lane, right? Fair enough. But what if I could learn to somehow feel good regardless of what just happened? I know, it’s so hard. Believe me, I know. I’m there with you all the time. I’ve only being doing this for 3 days so I’m no pro.
Thankfully there is a way for us all to shift feelings. Here are the set of techniques that have helped me survive the past three days. (thanks Lynn Grabhorn)
I hope that they enlighten you too:
1. Plan A: Smile. To get me warmed up, I try, as hard as I can to make myself smile. I can’t say that this is an easy thing to do. Frankly, the last thing I feel like doing when I’m feeling angry or down is smiling. Somehow my facial muscles don’t work. But because I’m determined to feel happy no matter what for the next 28 days, I’ve been fighting gravity and hard. And you know what? I’ve been getting good results. Whenever I force my cheeks to move up, I feel a minor rush of happiness. And that gets me going on my way to shifting my energy. I’m quite surprised by this finding because even though I’ve read research papers that show that when we smile, our body releases certain chemicals that make us feel good, I hadn’t experienced it first-hand. Which simply tells me that I hadn’t tried hard enough. And I must be smiling quite a bit lately because more than once my husband has asked me what I’m smiling about!
2. Plan B: Ask myself if ANYTHING is worth risking attracting negative stuff into my life. My second ammunition against negative feelings is to tell myself: “So what if (fill in with negative event such as: ‘that clueless driver cut across my lane’)? Is that event worth risking attracting negative stuff into my life – by allowing it to shift the energy that I’m emitting?” Of course not.
3. Plan C: Flip the switch. In case plans A or B don’t work, I’ve developed a mental list of things that make me feel happy. Lynn calls this technique ‘flipping the switch’. To flip my switch back to positive, I refer to my mental list to remind myself of all the good things in my life. And I have no doubt that if you look hard enough at your own life, that you’ll also find things to be happy about. Do you have a trip coming up? Did you recently win a bet? Do you have cute nieces and nephews? Did you recently get a gift from someone? Did someone cute poke you on facebook? I promise you that if you look close enough, you’ll find that you have plenty of things to feel good about. To get me through my 30-day challenge, I developed a list of 30 things that make me feel a tingle, one for each day.
What do you say? Are you feeling up for feeling happy- no matter what for the next 30 days – and attracting all the positive things that the universe has stored for you?
(Stay tuned for another post where I’ll share with you the positive things that come into my life after I complete my 30-day challenge)
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*thanks Lynn Grabhorn – spelling it that way just feeels much better
For yu’ my friend: If you’d like to learn more about the Law of Attraction, I suggest that you read one or all of the following: The Law of Attraction by Esther Hicks, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (available in DVD too), and Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting by Lynn Grabhorn.
YES, The Secret was shared with me a couple of months ago, and I am loving it – consider also reading: One minute for myself. Thanks for making your writings very down to earth and human – TIME and LIFE are precious!!!
brilliant!!!!! really inspiring!!!!!
i constantly try to apply this “be happy” technique, because i strongly believe in the power of attraction and in positive feedback aroused by “good vibe emissions”. your writing makes it sound even better. keep up the good work on you blog.
Hello again,
Reading your post reminded me of Stephen Covey’s 90/10 principle. It changed my life!
Positive thoughts only come when you acknowledge that you have no control over life and it’s ups and downs but that you are 100% responsible of your reactions.
I always use the “it can always get worse” thought to keep me in check whenever negativity tries to show it’s ugly face. That way, I’ve learned to enjoy traffic jams…IQ challenged clerks and rainy days. By this, I’ve become more patient, less reactive and alot happier!
I commend you on your challenge. Good luck!
Becca
Two comments in a day, you’d think I have nothing better to do…lol. I just received a ppt. presentation about the happiest man in the world Matthieu Ricard, the Dalai Lama’s second in command. In one of his books he talks about how we can physically modify our brains through the thoughts that we choose to have.
He says, that just as all body muscles the brain develops and strengthens the most used neurons. By having negative thoughts we are exercising the right cortex causing anxiety, depression, envy and hostility towards others…in other words, self-inflicted unhappiness.
He goes on to explain that by having more positive thoughts and trying to focus on the nicer side of things we exercise our left cortex elevating our pleasant emotions and therefore our happiness.
Ricard’s writings explain how it’s not about seeing the world through rose colored lenses from one day to the next but more so by systematically working on debilitating the unhappiness muscles that we have strengthened over the years by believing that we are victims of our past and of our environments, and strengthening those muscles that make us responsible for our own happiness.
So, it can be done! Looking forward to following up on your 30 day challenge.
Becca