The law of attraction. Does it work? YES. Well, most of the time...

When Jim Carrey was a struggling actor, he wrote himself a cheque for $10 million for “acting services rendered”, dating it 10 years from that date. He did this because, despite growing up in poverty (his family lived in a car at one point), he believed he could hit the big time as an actor. And he did. Within 10 years he was earning millions for films such as Ace Ventura and The Mask.

This story is a wonderful illustration of how much power we have to manifest what we want. That’s a message that comes up in angel card readings all the time, and a concept that I’ve used in my own life to get what I had my heart set on. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Alas, this approach is not guaranteed – which can be disappointing. Here are my thoughts on why.

If you read The Secret when it came out a decade ago, you’re probably familiar with the law of attraction (I didn’t; I found it too gimmicky). Here’s the concept in a nutshell: whatever you want, you can attract through your thoughts. If you focus on what you don’t want, you’ll block what you want, and probably attract what you don’t. 

Here’s how I’ve used the law of attraction to manifest specific things:

* When I needed a car in 2010, I was fearful of buying a car that would break down on me, so I asked the Universe to find me a car like my friend owned, which was cheap to run and super reliable. Within a few days I had spotted that model of car on the side of the road near my house with a ‘for sale’ sign in the window. My dad checked it out and said it was a good buy, so I put in a low offer and got it. Too easy! That car is now owned by my brother and despite being more than 20 years old, it has yet to fail a warrant of fitness.

* When I moved back to Sydney last year I was nervous about making friends. As an introvert, social situations are challenging for me. I visualised myself encircled by a group of friends and laughing – and I returned my thoughts to this vision time and time again. A month after I arrived, the angels drew my attention to a newspaper story about a new social group that had started. I joined the group and within two months I had found myself part of a group of friends who are awesome, and have made me feel like I belong here.

On the other hand, sometimes the law of attraction has not delivered. This can happen because sometimes things that we think we need are actually not right for us. I wouldn’t, for example, recommend focusing on manifesting a winning lottery ticket. Even though you might think a truckload of money is exactly what you need for a better life, the Universe knows better. (Yes, it worked for Jim Carrey, but his goal was more about career success than the financial payoff.)

I have focused on attracting a wonderful man into my life for about four years now, without success. However I can see now that the timing was wrong – I wasn’t ready for a healthy relationship, even though I thought I was. I had so much work to do on myself, in particular, bolstering my woefully low self-esteem (my neediness was hardly an attractive quality). If I’d been in a long-term relationship, I would never have embarked on the journey of personal development that has brought me to where I am now. Not only am I now a more independent, resourceful person who knows that happiness and love are derived from within me rather than in a relationship, I’ve also forged a more fulfilling career in the spiritual realm. I would never have taken this direction I hadn’t delved within to find answers to my own discontentment.

And that’s the thing about the law of attraction – while we do have the power to attract what we want, what we want might not be in our best interests. And we don’t have any say in the timing.
This is why I’m wary of self-help books and wellness bloggers that promise you can have anything you want if you just think positive. This philosophy can lead to disappointment and disillusionment. (I’ve written about the inflated promises dolled out by some sectors of the self-help industry before, read my blog post here.)

Keep believing, people. The law of attraction isn’t a perfect mail order system but it *does* work. (Eventually.)

I’d love to hear how the law of attraction has worked for you. Email me if you’d like to share your story.

Why being lonely is so dangerous

There’s a fairly well-to-do woman in her early 60s living underneath me, who keeps ‘accidentally running into me’ when I exit the lift. Her favourite thing to do when she pounces is to run through an ever-changing litany of complaints, which may include: the way the man living on the level above me waters his plants (too overflowy!), the jazz music the pub down the street plays on Sunday afternoons (too jazzy!), a water pipe between my unit and hers (God knows what her issue is with that – it’s not even leaking). Eventually I figured out her complaints are not borne of dissatisfaction but a more powerful and very dangerous emotion – loneliness.

Research shows that loneliness is as ruinous to your health as smoking. It raises your blood pressure and cholesterol, suppresses your immunity (making you vulnerable to disease) and increases your risk of heart disease, because your body is under constant stress. 

It’s estimated that more than 40 per cent of us will feel the pang of loneliness at some point. And being in a long-term relationship is no protection – research shows that more than 60 per cent of lonely people are married. I can’t imagine the misery of being in a relationship with someone you feel disconnected from.

The common thread that underpins loneliness is a lack of connection. That might be geographic – moving to a city far away from your loved ones, for example – or it might be emotion driven – feeling like your friends don’t understand you, or that everyone around you is having different experiences to you (such as having children when you’re unable to). 

For me personally, the threat of loneliness has always been far more damaging than the emotion itself. Being an introvert, I’m actually pretty content with solitude. But the idea that having only myself for company could be enforced rather than a choice has, at times, gripped me with terror. This has resulted in some poor choices – going out on dates with men who bore me, remaining friends with people who I have nothing in common with, to name two.

This fear is not as strong for me now because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to understand that being alone does not equate to being lonely. And at an age where most people’s social networks are reducing as they focus more on their family units, I’ve made a conscious effort to expand my circles of friends, because I’ve realised how much these connections add to my life. This includes volunteer work at retirement homes, joining a social club and, yes, this blog – which has made me realise I have a great deal in common with a great deal of people. I think, too, that becoming more comfortable with being myself has helped me connect with people on a deeper level while also developing an awareness that isolation is really an illusion. 

For all these reasons I don’t give my whingeing neighbour the brush-off, although I can’t say spending time with her is a joy. And I’m not sure that me feigning interest in her chatter out of a sense of obligation is beneficial to her. But I try to keep in mind that loneliness is a miserable emotion and it can make us do unhealthy and unhelpful things – like complain (which tends to repel people). I can only hope that having some understanding of the mechanics of loneliness will help me to be more proactive about taking steps to prevent it when I get to her age and beyond.

I am scared of setting goals - because it means I have to try (and possibly fail)

Delta Goodrem sang that she was born to try, but sometimes I think I was born NOT to try.

For most of my life I have had a fear of failure bubbling under the surface that has kept me from committing to things. Which boils down to this limiting, and ultimately flawed, logic: if you don’t try, you can’t fail.

This unconscious belief came to the fore recently when Liz Gilbert espoused the value of creating a five-year plan. “If you don’t know where you wanna be in five years... you’re already there,” she wrote. I was at the hair salon so, with nothing better to do, I pulled out my ever-present notebook and started imagining how I wanted my life to look in five years. And after jotting down “have at least two dogs” and “have stayed in an ice hotel” I couldn’t think of anything.

Actually, that’s not true.

I thought of lots of other things I wanted, but I couldn’t write them down. Because writing them down would force me to commit to them. And that would mean I have to try to achieve them, running a high risk of failing.

“Writing down your goals causes a disturbance in your own soul – wakes you up, and makes you take notice of your own desires,” Liz wrote.

Well, yes, Liz. But I didn’t want to notice my own desires. Because then I would have to do something about them.

I didn’t want to write down the number of clients I’d like to have or the amount of days I’d like to work or the blog reach I’d like to be hitting. I particularly didn’t want to inscribe in words the healthy relationship I would love to be in but secretly fear I am not good enough for.

When I look back now, I can see this has been a pattern throughout my life. I have often resisted pitching big, challenging feature ideas to editors because I have been scared they’ll reject them, or, worse, commission them but I’ll do an abysmal job in bringing them to life. I have never bothered to try and save money for anything specific in case I can’t hit my target, proving myself to be completely inept.

This mindset may be something I picked up from my play-it-safe parents (this is not a criticism, BTW, merely an observation of their generation), who are, I think, proud but slightly baffled at my bravery/stupidity (my words, not theirs) in opening a reiki and angel-card-reading business, but mostly it’s due to my own subconscious desire to protect myself. I have realised that it’s not the humiliation of failure that I’m afraid of, it’s the suspicion that that failure would prove that I was not good enough to have the thing I wanted.

Some spiritual teachers are opposed to using the word “try” in goal-setting because they say it gives you licence to fail. Saying “I’m going to try and run a marathon” is less potent than “I’m going to run a marathon” because the first option makes it more acceptable to quit – after all, you only committed to trying. I can see this point, but for me there’s strength in the trying. For me, *that’s* the point of power. Because when I take action, I’ve committed.

What this five-year-plan exercise did show me was that, yes, I have a fear of failure that takes the form of not trying – but it’s not completely paralysing me. There is a major area of my life where I am doing OK on this front. My business is not going as well as I’d hoped, but I am still showing up. Because my will to make a success of this is stronger than my fear of it failing. Maybe focusing on that is the key to defeating my allergy to trying.

Now, to try that five-year-plan exercise again…

 To read Liz Gilbert's post about five-year plans, click here.

Take heart. How to feel, give and receive more love

The heart chakra, located in the centre of the chest, is the energy centre that’s all about how we give and receive love – to all people, not just our partners, and to ourselves. 

People who have blockages in their heart chakra can be judgmental or they could be prone to jealousy. They might be unable to forgive someone or they might be grappling with grief.

As the fourth of the seven chakras, this is the meeting point of the energy centres that are associated with the physical world (the base, sacral and solar plexus chakras) and the three chakras representing the spiritual world (more on each of those in future posts). To get a bit airy-fairy, it’s where heaven and earth meet. 

When the heart chakra is balanced, we’re compassionate, empathetic, peaceful, loving and able to help others without depleting our own resources (i.e. we don’t overcommit). We’re also able to honour our feelings, crying when we need to, but also administer self-care when we need it – that’s everything from drawing ourselves a bubble bath to simply speaking kindly to ourselves. We’re also able to receive love easily – we don’t say ‘no’ to people when they offer to help and we don’t put up barriers when people who we like get close to us.

What I think is so significant about the heart chakra is that while the solar plexus was all about shame, this chakra’s enemy is grief. If you think about it, it is loss of any sort (not just bereavement) that makes the heart hurt. Because self-love is so strongly emphasised in this chakra, this loss might be to do with your attachment to ideas about what your life should look like or who you thought you should have become.

Repressed emotions really come to the fore in this chakra – particularly for people who suffered deep hurts in childhood such as a death in the family, bullying or abandonment by a parent.

People with deficiencies in the heart chakra might be:

* anti-social

* lonely

* fearful of intimacy

* narcissistic

* judgmental (including racist, sexist, homophobic etc)

* lacking empathy

* unable to let go

* unable to forgive

* struggling to accept help from people

People with excessive energy in the heart chakra might be:

* co-dependent

* jealous

* demanding of their loved ones

* needing to be needed

* fearful of betrayal

Any issues with the arms can be related, too – and when I’m clearing this chakra in a reiki session people often report tingling in their hands. That’s because this chakra is all about touch – and that’s a key way we show love to people, right?  

To clear blockages in the heart chakra, one suggestion I’ve heard is to try and go a week without criticising anyone, which will really help you examine how accepting you are.

· Remember that love is about giving AND receiving, so look at how you can increase the amount of love you’re giving out – that’s anything from smiling at people regularly to giving compliments and donating to people in need.

· If you’re into yoga, back bends, bridges and the wheel pose are great for targeting this chakra – and yoga also helps you to sit in the present moment, which is beneficial for your energy field as a whole.

If you’d like to work with me to heal any of the issues in this article, you can book energy healing sessions here. More information about how I work is available here.  

I see negative people, they're everywhere... (this is how I shield myself)

Lately the angel cards have repeatedly urged us to clear away toxic energies, so a blog post on shielding against negativity seemed like a good idea.

Having worked in the magazine industry for almost 15 years, I’ve crossed paths with some fairly extreme personalities. Narcissism, cynicism, backstabbing and just plain nastiness are par for the course in what is a highly competitive field - although, this can happen in any workplace. Because I’m very sensitive to other people’s energy (read my post about that here), it’s been essential to learn to avoid absorbing those harsh energies. If I don’t protect myself from negativity emanating from the Eeyores or the Regina Georges of this world, I feel sluggish, miserable and on edge.

In the past year I’ve become better at shielding myself against negative energies. It’s not possible to live in a place where you never encounter whingers or mean-spirited types, but you can certainly limit the extent that you're affected by them. I do a shielding exercise every morning as part of my daily meditation. I also often carry crystals, such as clear quartz and labrodite to prevent me absorbing other people’s energies – particularly when I’m doing reiki sessions, during which I’m working intensely in people’s energy fields – but you don't have to go to those lengths.

This is how my shielding exercise works. While meditating (you don't have to meditate to do this, you can just visualise it), I’ll call upon Archangel Michael, the archangel in charge of protection, to create a shield around me. He's the patron saint of police officers and security guards, so I regard him as my spiritual bouncer. I’ll envisage him using his sword to create a bubble of white light around me for protection. Next, I’ll ask for extra layers. If I’m feeling like my self-love or compassion are lacking, I’ll ask for a layer of sparkly pink light to boost my love energy. If I’m feeling emotional, I might ask for green energy, which opens my heart chakra and invokes healing. Then I’ll ask for a layer of purple light, which is psychic protection, or energy field protection. Basically, this protects me from lower energies, negativity and harsh energies. If this is too complicated or just too 'out there' for you, just focus on the white light layer – that’s for general protection. I ask for this to remain intact for 24 hours.

Does this mean I’ll never encounter criticism or nastiness? No. Haters gonna hate, as that wise philosopher Taylor Swift once declared (lol). But it does mean I don’t feel myself being sucked into that vortex. I’m not taking on what I’m being exposed to. It’s easier to simply shake it off (sorry, couldn’t resist that one).

Most emotions will hit you with no rhyme or reason, and there’s little you can do about that. But when those emotions belong to other people, you don’t have to take them on. Shielding yourself is a way to take control.

*If you feel like you’re weighed down with other people’s energies, a reiki session can help. I also offer distance energy healing and cord cutting; email onegroundedangel@gmail.com for more information.