Monday morning energy forcing
Anne K. sends me an e-mail about how unpleasantly her Monday mornings begin as she immediately starts bombarding herself with list of “shoulds,” a habit I am intimately familiar with.
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The Monday morning thing is SO familiar to me! This morning I’m supposed to be writing a bio for a potential client and I’ve got a bad case of the “DON’T WANNAS.” Every time I think of doing this, I DON’T WANT TO DO IT! But what is it that I really don’t want to do? I don’t want to struggle with trying to present myself in some elusively perfect way, or, as Elias would say, I want to keep my attention on myself and express myself freely, which my beliefs say won’t work for a business presentationWhereas if you had asked me to tell you more about myself and the work I want to be doing and what I have to offer and why I think I’m good at it, there would be no problem. I would feel free to express myself without constraint and without trying to fit into some proper business mold. I wouldn’t get focused on areas where I discount and doubt myself (as in, “What are your credentials? What makes you an expert in this area? Are you a specialist in these areas?”). I wouldn’t be trying to find the right words to get you to think I’m wonderful and to hire me. I’d just happily tell you about myself.
Since I’m a master at forcing energy, I’ve been playing with ways not to force energy for a long time. When I’d have one of those mornings like the one you just described where there was this list of crap I didn’t feel like doing, I’d make a new list labeled “What has to be done if I ended up spending the day in the emergency room.” In other words, if I manifested something that made it impossible for me to work that day, what would absolutely have to be attended to on that very day?
My list would usually dwindle to one or two things. Or sometimes all the things could be put off. What a relief! Like the way your decision to stop trying to write freed you up to write, this would often be enough to free up my energy so I’d feel like actually doing stuff that five minutes before had seemed revolting.
In my recently released session, Elias suggests that I follow all my impulses to do whatever I feel like doing (instead of what I think I SHOULD be doing) as a way of learning to trust myself and listen to myself. This is a variation on a program I made up about 30 years ago for conscious eating, which is on my website:
http://www.changingyourmind.com/Practice/Practice.htm.
And I notice this is how I live naturally–how I prefer to live–but, as you mentioned happens in your life, when I get focused outside myself and my attention is projected out of the present, then I start worrying about the “what ifs” and that’s when the control factor rears its ugly head and all this self-awareness goes out the window.
It does seem funny that we persist in asking ourselves, “How is this [taking a walk or whatever diversion we’re impulsively pursuing] going to pay the rent?” when you’ve experienced and I’ve experienced that relaxing and allowing our impulses to lead us and trusting that things will work out is what pays the rent. Not taking the walk, but learning to listen to ourselves, follow our impulses, and trust ourselves.
It’s amazing to me that trusting my impulses and listening to myself, things that feel so satisfying and right, is so hard for me to practice routinely. What’s particularly bizarre to me about my on-going challenges in these areas is that I TEACH this way of living to other people, yet still I struggle with it. That’s probably what makes me good at teaching it–I have so many experiences to share in this area. Which reminds me of the famous
Thomas Edison story:
Thomas Edison once mentioned to reporters that he had tried over 10,000 materials as filaments for his new invention, the electric light bulb. One reporter asked how the young inventor maintained his persistence in the face of so much failure. “Failure?” he responded. “I didn’t fail. What I did was successfully eliminate 10,000 elements which were unacceptable for my needs.” What most people would call failure, Edison saw as the process of invention.
So, I suppose you and I could look at our adventures as a process for eliminating 10,000 ways to express energy that are unacceptable for our needs.
The fact is that I’ve spent these past several years trying to live in this new and unfamiliar way (deliberately, consistently, purposefully), and through it all my critical voice (which is the voice of mass consciousness and MY MOTHER) sounds relentlessly, “You can’t live this way! What if everybody did whatever they wanted? How are you going to make a living? You’re just being lazy! You always try to get out of working!” (Etcetera, ad nauseum.) I have to keep saying to that aspect of myself, “Thank you for sharing and I choose differently.”
I notice last night as I contemplated writing my bio and I was feeling a bit of energy forcing pressure that I started to feel some flu-like symptoms. I then noticed that this led me in the direction of looking at the week differently: what if I got sick and COULDN’T do things on my list? (a variation on “if I were in the emergency room”), which led back to looking at how easily I move into forcing energy in relation to anything business related. As usual, what I don’t want to do is not about the actual things on my list. What I don’t want to do is force my energy.
I notice that if I can truly let myself “run free,” so to speak, that I eventually do the things I think NEED to be done, or they seem to solve themselves magically and fall off the list. Abraham points out repeatedly that allowing yourself to follow your energy this way leads to things getting done more smoothly. It allows things to fall into place so effort is not involved.
[Current comments: I still haven’t written that particular bio, but I did recently rewrite the contact page for my website and this blog. That took a huge amount of work as I struggled to find ways to express myself freely, but not so freely that I triggered my fears of coloring too far outside the lines. Anne K. helped me immensely with this task by reading what I’d written and giving me useful feedback.
As I struggled with my resistance to writing my contact page, I tried to get at what the problem was. Part of it had to do with being so SICK of the traditional approach to bios where the person sounds like God’s anointed when the truth of the matter with any of us is, “You might love working with me, or you might think I’m just okay, or you might not like me at all.” Because whether someone will find me a good fit for their particular needs has so little to do with how brilliant I am, or what I can do, or what I’ve done, or how great I make myself sound in a damned bio.
That made me think of shortening my bio to an Elias-like statement: “Will you find me useful to work with? That would be your choice!”
Toward the end of passing these iterations of my contact page back and forth to Anne K., I read an amusing bio written by a techie co-author in one of the “for dummies” books. I felt my energy shift as read this tongue-in-cheek bio. As a result, I gave myself permission to let a little more of my humorous side to show, and the writing immediately became easier.
Then there was the question of a photo for my contact page. I have no current professional looking photos, but I do have a photo that amuses me that I took of myself with my digital camera accidentally set on “macro” (to photograph something very close). I’m out of focus in the photo, which is how I’ve often felt during these past few strange years.
Wanting to use this photo brought up my duplicity-ridden “truth” about following the rules. Is it “bad” to be out of focus? Is it “bad” to use an out of focus photo that I like for professional purposes? Do I even need to consider any of this now that publishing this blog puts me in violation of conventional rules dictating what’s appropriate to disclose when trying to pimp my image?
As usual, the answer to all those questions is, as Elias says so succinctly, my choice. And I chose to use the photo that shows me coming through the matter transporter, not quite focused into this reality.]