Episode 52 - Turning Bad into Good with the Law of Attraction

Transcript

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[Commercial]

Renee Stephens:  Welcome to Inside Out Weight Loss.  I am your host Renee Stephens and together we are accessing and adjusting the control panel of your mind-body system bringing ease and joy to your weight loss journey and fullness to the rest of your life.

On today’s show, making sense of bad experiences and how to turn them around so they actually build your dreams.

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The only thing that truly exists that we know about is the present moment, the now, and by the way if the past and the future only exist in our minds and our imagination then we can change our minds, can’t we?  Well in fact what the law of attraction says is that it works no matter what, that whatever shows up in our lives is a reflection of what we are sending out in our lives.

So what about the homeless guy who calls my client fat?  Well, law of attraction would say that that is a contrast experience, a contrast experience.  What does that mean?  That means that in order for us to appreciate good things, we must have some contrast so that we can compare good things from bad things.  We must have contrast.

[Music]

Let’s go ahead and drop inside.  Lets take this moment to become present with you and your current experience, your emotions.  Notice how you are feeling emotionally in this moment, and as you do that also notice the way your emotional state affects your physical state.  Is there any muscle tension or tightness or perhaps relaxation?

Maybe you’re feeling open and ready to absorb and learn what’s offered in today’s episode.  Simply take a moment and check in.  As you’re doing that I’d like to share a few moments of bliss from my friend Kerstin Sjoquist who publishes daily blisstrips at her website blisstrips.com.  If you got to blisstrips.com and there’s a link to this on my blog at PersonalLifeMedia.com/Renee you can register to receive one of her blisstrips for free, each and every day.

And today’s blisstrip is ‘Close your eyes and breathe deeply into your center’, and as you exhale, imagine that breath flowing outward, as a river carves a gentle channel through the earth.  Imagine your breath creating a space in your life, creating room to grow.  Breathe outward and with each sigh feel your life clearing, simplifying, expanding.

Create a space within, a quiet place, and allow that focus to create space without.  And with that, take a moment to become aware and present to your intention for today’s episode for your journey.  Remember, you are very likely to achieve your intention.  Your intention is very likely to manifest.  So set it well.

Consider not just the outcome that you want, a certain wait, a certain stamina or endurance level, or close eyes, fitting into those jeans in your closet or even freedom from binging or even purging, but also consider in your intention, the process how you want the experience of getting to where you’re going to be for you.

It’s very important to pay attention to the process because the process is the journey and the journey is the destination.  My friend Heather Dominique, who is a wonderful and gifted coach to business people on growing their businesses, talks about something she calls the ‘Myth of arrival’ and when she said that recently, I really identified with it.  I thought, “That makes so much sense that we all have this myth that we will arrive, the myth that when we reach that special weight when we fit into those clothes that we want to fit into, when we are at fitness level that we want when we have the perfect relationship, an amazing job, whether right amount of money, then and only then we’ll all be well”.

It’s really the myth of arrival.  I know I certainly subscribed to it, all the way until I lost my weight and discovered much to my dismay, that I was still depressed.  Well that was a bit of a bummer, you know.  I mean the deal was once I was thin all would be well, right?  It didn’t happen that way.

And so the gift of the process as opposed to the myth of arrival, the gift of the process is that we can both enjoy the journey in the present moment now as we attract and create the future outcomes that we desire.  I mean isn’t that truly ____06:55____ like having your cake and eating it too?  I can’t resist.

Isn’t that really like having it all, enjoying the journey now because why the heck not?  You know what I am saying?  Why not have a good day today?  Why not have the most amazing day today that you could possibly imagine having?  What stops you from that?  Nothing outside of you, I can tell you.

Your boss doesn’t stop you from that, your partner doesn’t stop you from having that, your friends don’t stop you from having that, traffic doesn’t stop you from having that.  You can, in any moment, decide to have the most amazing day that you possibly can in this day, today.  Why not make the very most of it, whatever it involves, to really seize this day and say, “Yes” to it, “Yes” to whatever it brings to you and enjoy it.

Maybe you’d even like to bring some humor to your day, maybe you’d like to laugh about it, laugh about how amusing the whole thing is, the whole setup is, yes, how about that?  Why not?  Why not enjoy this moment today because the truth is that all we ever have is the now.  This is what _______ is talking about when he talks about the power of now.  The future and the past, as I said in the last episode, where do they live?  Where do they exist?  Nowhere, but in our imagination.

The only thing that truly exist that we know about is the present moment, the now.  And by the way, if the past and the future only exist in our minds and our imagination then we can change our minds, can’t we?  Yes, we can.  And in fact one of the most powerful techniques that I do is a technique of changing history.  It’s an NLP technique called ‘Changing history’ and in that technique we literally go back into the past and change it so that the emotional imprint that the past has on us, shifts positively.

So what was a wound, what was a scar, becomes a source of strength, love, connection and joy.  It’s a pretty profound technique because we bring it back up.  Say, something happened to you at 7-years-old that was very difficult for you and that you don’t remember.  I remember when I was 2, have I shared this story before when I was 2 or 3 years old?

I was with my grandmother in the zoo and she bought me a balloon and I lost the balloon and that was the last time that I ever saw my grandmother, and my little two-and-a-half, three-year-old brain figured out that because she was cross with me about losing my balloon, somehow I had made her go away never to come back.

This was a profound memory for me.  Rationally, it doesn’t make any sense but it was influencing me in the present.  It was causing me to think that there was something wrong with me, that I did bad things.  So when I went back, and this was the first time I ever did this in my entire life, when I went back and changed that memory and forgave myself and brought my adult understanding to that little girl, my whole current experience changed.  We can change the past because we can change our minds.

I wanted to share with you briefly a message that I recently got from a client.  I haven’t worked for this client for a couple of months and hadn’t heard from her, didn’t know what was happening, and she wrote to tell me that her partner had been diagnosed with a type of leukemia so they had been very much immersed in the medical process and the diagnoses.

Thankfully, this particular type of leukemia is not necessarily life-threatening that many people live wonderful lives for decades and decades.  Nevertheless, she is getting chemotherapy and she writes to talk about moving into the caretaker role or the possibility of moving into the caretaker role, and she writes, “I don’t feel that I had to take on all the caretaker responsibilities and duties.  I am standing back and allowing other people to step up.  There are a lots of reasons for this, some of which include letting my partner see all the people who want to support and help her”.

“Two, it’s important for my partner to know that she has more than one person to rely on and third, I don’t have to lose or sacrifice myself during this time”.  I was so excited to read this message from my client because it truly marks her stepping up to taking care of herself, stepping up to putting on her own oxygen mask and allowing herself then from that place of strength to take care of others.

But also looking at it from the other perspective, we often think, “Oh I must do all the caretaking, it’s all down to me”, and what my client here is saying is that there are a lot of other people in her partner’s life that also want to pitch in and be present and it’s actually doing a disservice to her partner and all of her partner’s friend, for her to take over all of the caretaking as if she were the only one.

And I think that’s a really useful perspective to have and I was so excited to read that she had gotten to this place because I can tell you that it is an awfully long way from where she was before we started our work together.  She was the kind of person who wouldn’t speak up and was really learning to speak her truth, was really learning to stand up for herself and take great care of herself.

So I want to congratulate her for stepping up into this open caretaking role.  Caretaking yes, she will do a great deal of that, some of that, but she will also allow plenty of space for other people as she takes great care of herself so that she then has more to give.

Let’s take a break now to support our sponsors, and after the break I’d like to talk to you about what to do in ‘Law of Attraction’ terms when things don’t go the way you planned, when you are not happy, when you have a bad experience.  How to turn that around and start back attracting what you truly wants.

This is Renee Stephens and you’re listening to Inside Out Weight Loss on Personal Life Media.

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Renee Stephens:  We’re back now.  Before the break we were talking about how taking care of yourself truly is the most effective and powerful way to give back to others.  We also talked about the ‘Myth of Arrival’ and the ‘Joy of the Journey’.

Now what I’d like to talk to you about is what to do when things don’t go the way you planned, when bad stuff happens, because let’s face it, it does in life, bad stuff happens.  You think you’re doing all the right things, you step on the scale and ‘oh my god, it doesn’t look so good, yikes’.

You think you’re doing all the right things and somebody yells at you or someone gets sick or there’s a problem at work or who knows what, it can be all sorts of stuff happens in our lives, big stuff happens, and what do we do with that?  I mean what does that mean for the Law of Attraction?  What if you’ve been doing your best to feel positive, you’ve dreamed your dreams and then something not so good happens?

What do you do?  What does it mean?  Does it mean that the Law of Attraction doesn’t work?  Well in fact, what the Law of Attraction says is that it works no matter what, that whatever shows up in our lives is a reflection of what we’re sending out in our lives.

If we get back mixed signals it’s because we have mixed energies.  Anyway, but let’s talk about when stuff happens that we’re not so happy about.  For example, let’s just say you’re feeling really good and then somebody makes a comment that is something less than flattering.  They make a comment about your body and they could comment to you on the street that you find insulting or upsetting.

Bummer, man, where had that come from?  I remember one client of mine, a homeless person on the street, called her fat.  Now how random is that?  How are, and that just feels like, “Man, what is up with this?”  She was kind of bummed out, understandably so.  If homeless people are making a comment about you, it doesn’t seem so good.

So what does Law of Attraction say about this?  Law of Attraction says, “Yeah, you know what, it ain’t all good all the time”.  As lovely as that would be, although then again, maybe we wouldn’t appreciate it.  I was trying to explain to my son what it meant to be spoiled, we read it in a book together and I thought ‘what is spoiled?’ 

And I think like ‘spoiled’ really comes down to being someone who gets a lot of stuff and doesn’t appreciate it and only wants more and more and more, that’s what a spoilt brat is to me, a child especially who gets all sorts of things, whatever their whim is so that they never appreciate what they get, interesting.

That means that doesn’t really matter how much you get of great stuff that you could avoid being spoilt simply by appreciating everything that you do have and receive.  Hmm, that sounds like a nice alternative.  So what about the homeless guy who calls my client fat?  Bummer, you know, well, Law of Attraction would say that that is a contrast experience, a contrast experience.

What does that mean?  That means that in order for us to appreciate good things, we must have some contrast so that we can compare good things from bad things.  We must have contrast so that we can decide that we like one thing more than another thing.  So a bad experience is called a contrast experience, so for her, it was entirely clear to her that she didn’t like this homeless person freely offering his opinion about her body.  That was a contrast experience.

Now the trick is, the danger is that if we let that get us down, if we put our energy in that area and allow it to bum us out and get us down, then guess what, we are lowering our vibration and we’re attracting more bad stuff into our lives.  That’s the game, that’s the spiritual practice.

How do we respond when bad stuff happens?  How do we respond to it?  That’s our choice, that is our opportunity.  So her choice was to say, “Oh man, I will never change.  Everybody is thinking bad thoughts about me.  I know it, even the homeless person feels fit to comment on my size”.  Bummer. 

Or she could say, “Ok, well it’s clear that I am not liking that.  It is entirely clear that I am not liking that.  In fact, I want something different”, and here we go back to that magic question that I offered a few episodes ago that can turn bad into good, and the magic question is ‘What would I like instead?’  What would I like instead?

This I see as a contrast experience, as an opportunity for me to become fully aware of what I do not want in my life and to decide what the heck I want instead.  Well, she may have said, “What I want instead is for the homeless person to stay quiet”, or she could have, what she did, we did together in a session, go a step beyond that, a step to where she felt so good within herself that she didn’t really care what other people thought about her, that she could even laugh at it.

In fact we did have a good laugh about this when in the session because it was extraordinarily random, as we said.  Anyway, so she chose to respond with laughter in the session.  Oh laughter, the great opener, what joy that is, great.  What does she want instead?  She wants to feel good about herself.  She wants to feel confident within herself so that whatever the people say, just rolls off her like water off of a duck’s back.

Now, we’ve turned the energy around.  We’ve now fed that contrast experience, used it to feed our discernment, used it to feed the definition of our dream.  Now she can add that, “Oh yes, well I’d like to be this other way instead of the way that I am now.  Now I get bummed out when a homeless person says this to me, instead in future I’d like to feel so good that I don’t care”.

Maybe she wanted to go even further if she could say, “I would like to feel compassioned for the homeless person.”  Who knows?  I mean I am not saying you have to go there but I am offering that as an option of a way to turn that energy around.

So when bad stuff happens, no we don’t like it, not fun, not fun at all, and in fact we can ask the universe, we can set our intent that our contrast experiences be small so that, and we be able to notice small dips and negative experiences rather than needing big, ‘knock you upside the head’ kind of contrast experiences.  It’s maybe we want to just have subtle experiences so the contrast is not so big.  That sounds good to me.

We want to notice those subtle experiences and use them as fuel to further define what we want, to further build our dream, and there we do that beautiful slide of hand, that beautiful martial art turning the energy around and all of a sudden it’s gone positive again, and that is an option that each of us has available to us every moment throughout the day, no matter what happens during the day.

So I encourage you to think about that and even write a comment on the blog about how you have noticed your contrast experiences and how you’ve been able even in the tiniest ways to turn those around because I tell you what, if you turn a negative into a positive, even in the tiniest way, even by asking the question only, ‘What do I want instead’, you will start to notice big, positive effects in your life.

That brings us to the end of our show today.  Thank you for being present.

If you like to take this journey even deeper, consider the products available for sale on my site, mindforbody.com, M-I-N-D-F-O-R-B-O-D-Y [dot] com.  There are three guided journeys to take you to an even deeper place.  Plus, check the site because I’ll be very shortly introducing some powerful group programs where you can take your learning and your transformation deeper and faster.

And by the way, go ahead and join that yahoo group.  Research clearly shows that those who form a support group achieve their dreams and are successful more consistently and longer than those who do not.  There’s a link to the yahoo group on my blog at www.personallifemedia.com/renee.

This is your host Renee Stephens and I am on a mission to eradicate the weight struggle from the planet enabling you to share your soul’s gifts.  Join me as we evolve the world by evolving ourselves.  Take good care.

Moderator:  Find more great shows like this on PerosnalLifeMedia.com.