I decided to try online dating again after I got inspired to create this fun tinder profile:
My plan was to match with a bunch of fun people and follow up with clever lines like.
A focus wheel is a powerful exercise that helps you align with your desire . It’s incredibly simple. Name your desire. Write out twelve statements that match that desire and feel true. (Only write down thoughts that feel very pure and don’t require convincing to get you to believe them, let every other thought go.) Then finish with a declarative Statement that excites you about what you’ve accomplished simply by completing this exercise.
After yesterday’s post on manifesting the perfect people to live with, I’ve decided to share the focus wheel that helped me accomplish it. I completed it about a month ago with the help of a friend who advised me to read it every morning and night for a week and then put it away and let the universe do its work.
At the time I was hoping to get into a big cooperative house, but discouraged by how slowly things were progressing, and the fact that in order to get in I would need to gain the approval of at least 20 other housemates (a single “block” disqualifies you). So we softened it by saying “I’ll get into this house or somewhere even better!” and then began reaching for the essence behind my desire.
In this post I’ll share the focus wheel I created. And then describe the unexpected ways that these thoughts begin influencing my reality, that eventually led to me finding the perfect new home.
The more I explore emotions, the more I realize how biased I am against the negative ones. Noticing this trend has led to a radical thought, “What if there are no good or bad emotions? What if each emotion has a gift that no other emotion can give us? Am I passing up the gift of all the lower emotions because I’m too arrogant to believe they have something of value to offer me?”
Last night I started reading a book called The Gift of Fear, where the author talks about situations where people were victimized. I found myself turned off by it. It didn’t feel empowering to see other people as a victim. But he took things to a deeper level by talking about how our intuition can predict and steer us away from violence before it happens. In that sense we’re not really a victim of other’s actions, but not following our own guidance.
As fate would have it, today I had an experience where I felt like a victim. But instead of just acting like a victim, I owned it. “I asked you to stop repeatedly and you didn’t, that’s like rape!” Maybe I was being melodramatic, especially since the only things being hurled at me were words, but there was something soothing about seeing myself as a victim. It made it OK for me to feel like I did because it felt like the appropriate response to that situation. Instead of beating myself up for feeling in a negative place, I understood why I felt the way I did.
Naming it actually caused me to feel less like a victim. I immediately cut myself some slack, and stopped being a victim of my own self-judgment. No longer saddled by my own in-fighting, I could focus on the circumstances at hand with fresh eyes. I felt empowered to shift the situation now that I knew what role I was playing in it. And once I made that shift, whatever I was doing to attract the behavior that was victimizing me ended too.
It feels weird putting it this way, but identifying myself as a victim actually made me feel more empowered. The moment I had this realization, I thought back to The Gift of Fear. After, feeling the power of being a victim, firsthand, I now felt eager to crack open that book and read it with an open mind. In fact, I wasn’t a victim at all! I was the benefactor of an experience that helped me connect with a desire I never even knew I had!
I never would have guessed that I would want to feel like a victim, but feeling it led to the profound realization about my life’s work. Now the side project I’d been working on that involves navigating the emotional scale from the lowest lows to the highest highs, has become the work I want to build my life around. I want to find a way to focus on it more and more and include others in the process, and write a book littered with success stories from all the people this work has helped along the way.
And maybe I don’t even need to try to build my life around it. Maybe events like today will happen more frequently, and my desire to follow through on this work will manifest whether I try to make it happen or not.
What I am discovering is that the power of understanding your emotions and how to leverage them properly can create powerful shifts in both your physical and emotional world. Just by understanding where you’re coming from, and how you want to feel, you can navigate even the trickiest of situations. Just like a GPS can take you anywhere you want to go, just by knowing where you are and where you want to be.
In this video I’ll try to dive deeper into this subject, and hopefully discover some new insights along the way. So tune in if you’re ready to explore those lower emotions in a new light, and reclaim power you might have otherwise discarded.
This episode of Meeting Criticism with Love is about doing the vibrational work to help you regularly and easily practice noncomplementary behavior (being able to meet hostility with warmth). I’ll be using my vibrational mastery process that I’ve showcased in several past videos.
The vibrational mastery process works by asking a series of questions on different emotional levels starting from the most negative emotions and going all the way to the best feeling emotions. (E.g. “What do I fear?” “What do I need?” “What do I hate about this?” “How might I be disappointed?” “What am I worried about?” Then by the end the questions are: “What would I be excited to wake up to every morning?” “What about this stirs my passion?” “What do I love about this?”)
It basically helps you find peace with a topic on every emotional level, so that no matter how you’re feeling about it, you never feel lost or stuck. It’s like knowing a city so well you could never get lost in it. But with your own emotional landscape.
Here’s the link to Episode 1 of Meeting Criticism with Love in case you missed it.
Do you find yourself getting overly defensive when others criticize you? Does the prospect of being criticized prevent you from sharing something you’d otherwise love to? Then you’ll definitely learn a thing or two from this series on Meeting Criticism with Love. Join me as I go through my own personal journey toward creating a healthier relationship with criticism so I can create with ease and flow.
“Psychology has a golden rule: If I am warm, you are usually warm. If I am hostile, you are too. But what happens if you flip the script and meet hostility with warmth? It’s called ‘noncomplementary behavior — a mouthful, but a powerful concept, and very hard to execute. But people do manage to sometimes behave in noncomplementary ways. And when they do, it often completely shakes up a situation.”
A friend of mine recently started live streaming every day, and even though I’ve only watched about 5% of the stuff he’s put out there, it was enough to inspire me to start live streaming 4 times a week. I’m only at the beginning of my live streaming journey, but I’m already getting tremendous benefit from it! Here are 5 things I’ve already learned to love from my first week of live streaming.
I live stream every Monday/Weds/Thurs/Saturday, usually in the evenings. Check out my Live Your Desires Facebook page to watch old videos, or like it to be notified when I’m streaming live.
I did some more inspired movements tonight while on the phone with a freind. Midway through she started asking me questions and then I would allow my inspired movements to show me the answer. Here are some of the interpretations/experiences that came forth.
A friend of mine recently asked me about my thoughts on cheating after experiencing a “yucky” situation. Hopefully you’ll find some of these useful if you’ve ever cheated, been cheated on, or been party to someone else’s cheating.
1) The root of all cheating can boiled down to one question, “Why would deception feel easier than the truth?”
Lies inherently require more effort and mental resources than simply telling the truth, but they often appear to be a shortcut to what we want. Why would this be? Perhaps because the person being deceived is perceived as more of an obstacle than an avenue, so the path of least resistance is simply to go around them.
2) Cheating often has a placebo effect in the sense that trying something outside the rules makes it easier to believe we’ll experience the desire that’s been eluding us. A healthy alternative is to break patterns instead of rules. Rules prohibit us from specific things in obvious ways; patterns prohibit us from whole swaths of possibilities in ways we seldom even notice.
3) Relationships die because they stop growing. They become fixed and dependable, which gives us a breather from dealing with the uncertainty of life, but the only reason we want that breather is because we’ve lost faith in our ability to attract what we desire through the unknown.
Cheating exposes us to the unknown through a familiar channel with the specific intent of satisfying desire. It blends the unknown with some of the desires that are on our mind most often. Perhaps if we more actively integrated the unknown into our daily lives, we could cultivate the fruit that cheating yields without having to pluck from another tree.
I recently had a bunch of blood tests done and I noticed that if the nurse inserted the needle just one millimeter off from the vein, he or she wouldn’t be able to draw blood no matter how much they poked around. But if the nurse was spot on, blood would be drawn with ease 100% of the time. The first time I got poked it was just to the left of the vein, and no blood was drawn. Then they’d try again and do it perfectly. So the next nurse that saw me saw two tiny holes in my arm and tried the one that didn’t work first. This pattern of getting poked twice instead of once continued until I discovered that if I simply told them, “this hole works, that hole draws nothing,” they would get it right 100% of the time.
Some of us are so used to measuring productivity by how much work we do, that it’s easy to get confused when hard work doesn’t lead to results. But, sometimes working hard is like trying to draw blood from a spot just millimeters off from the vein. It looks so much like it should work that it can fool three seasoned professionals, but in the end you get next to nothing even though they’re performing the exact same actions that lead to success when they find an angle that’s spot on.
Yesterday I watched two guys playing chess and found myself thinking, “That looks fun, but I’m not good enough to know how to play optimally, so why bother?” As I kept watching I noticed myself having fun just thinking about the moves I would make if I was playing, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could play just for fun and not be invested in winning or losing?”
That got me thinking. If I’m setting the bar this high for a game I don’t even play, and it’s preventing me from even starting, what is this line of thinking doing to things I genuinely want to accomplish?