I don’t have much free time this morning, so this will be quick …
One of the biggest rookie mistakes I see with people who are trying to use “the Secret” (here, I’m referring to the Law of Attraction as described in the movie, The Secret) or tapping is that they try to paste a positive vision on top of a bunch of old negative thinking.
What I teach my clients (learn more about my coaching options here) is that if you have spent a lot of your life in ego consciousness, the first step to effective manifestation is not adding more crap on top of the crap you already have … the first step is EMPTYING YOURSELF OUT …
The ego has implanted an entire belief system in your mind that will NEVER get you what you really want, no matter how many years you waste trying. So the first thing we must do is uproot the ego from your mind, and let it go …
It’s akin to this famous spiritual proverb:
A famous and learned professor once went to visit a Zen master to argue about Zen. The Zen master offered tea and continued pouring into the professor’s cup until it was overflowing. He continued pouring and pouring. The professor protested, thinking his host a madman and saying the teacup was too full to hold any more. “You are like this cup,” the Zen master told his guest. “too full of your own opinions to receive anything else.”
We must unplug you from the Matrix, where you have been enslaved for your entire lifetime on this planet. To understand what your deepest self really wants, you must first understand that your ego thinks it wants things that are not going to make you happy. The reason it’s so important to question conventional wisdom is that many of the ego’s desires will be dressed up as “oh, that’s just the way the world is.” And while those ego demands are in the way, there is no room to receive what you really want.
You can stay on the ego’s hamster wheel forever if you like, but it will never bring you true happiness.
Thus, true transformation means that every belief in your belief system must be brought to the light to be questioned. This means a humble acceptance, at the beginning, of what is expressed in this exercise from Lesson 23 of the Workbook for A Course in Miracles:
I do not perceive my own best interests.
In no situation that arises do you realize the outcome that would make you happy. Therefore, you have no guide to appropriate action, and no way of judging the result. What you do is determined by your perception of the situation, and that perception is wrong. It is inevitable, then, that you will not serve your own best interests. Yet they are your only goal in any situation which is correctly perceived. Otherwise, you will not recognize what they are.
If you realized that you do not perceive your own best interests, you could be taught what they are. But in the presence of your conviction that you do know what they are, you cannot learn. The idea for today is a step toward opening your mind so that learning can begin.
The exercises for today require much more honesty than you are accustomed to using. A few subjects, honestly and carefully considered in each of the five practice periods which should be undertaken today, will be more helpful than a more cursory examination of a large number. Two minutes are suggested for each of the mind-searching periods which the exercises involve.
The practice periods should begin with repeating today’s idea, followed by searching the mind, with closed eyes, for unresolved situations about which you are currently concerned. The emphasis should be on uncovering the outcome you want. You will quickly realize that you have a number of goals in mind as part of the desired outcome, and also that these goals are on different levels and often conflict.
In applying the idea for today, name each situation that occurs to you, and then enumerate carefully as many goals as possible that you would like to be met in its resolution. The form of each application should be roughly as follows:
In the situation involving ______, I would like ______to happen, and ______ to happen,
and so on. Try to cover as many different kinds of outcomes as may honestly occur to you, even if some of them do not appear to be directly related to the situation, or even to be inherent in it at all.
If these exercises are done properly, you will quickly recognize that you are making a large number of demands of the situation which have nothing to do with it. You will also recognize that many of your goals are contradictory, that you have no unified outcome in mind, and that you must experience disappointment in connection with some of your goals, however the situation turns out.
After covering the list of as many hoped-for goals as possible, for each unresolved situation that crosses your mind say to yourself:
I do not perceive my own best interests in this situation,
and go on to the next one.
Let me know how this one goes for you … :)