Thinking about What You Do Not Want Does Not Help You Get What You Do

It can be hard to pull our attention away from the things we do not like about our lives or the problems we face. We naturally prefer more pleasant circumstances and negative emotions can have a strong pull. We are conditioned to think more negatively and worry, fear, doubt and anxiety come easily to us. We have no problem going to these places and staying there for prolonged periods of time. We do not like it but it is comfortable and familiar and we are always drawn towards that, no matter what kind of crap storm that creates in our lives.

I have learned lots of stuff in my journey to better myself and my life and one of the most profound and life-changing lessons was the realization that we focus on expands. By putting our attention and energy to all the stuff we do not like, all the bad things that have happened to us in the past and all the bad things we hope to avoid in the future, we are blocking the good things from flowing in.

It is vital for you to know that focusing on what you do not want will not help you get what you do. It is all about energy. Focusing on what you do not want is in no way the same as focusing on what you do. They do not accomplish similar goals. Getting clear on what you do not want can be a springboard to figuring out what you do, and some focus has its value, but you need to shift it as best you can whenever you find yourself going there.

If you continue to complain about everything and worry about all the stuff you hope does not happen, you will just continue to get more of that stuff, I promise you that. It took me a long time to really realize this and it is a lesson I am still learning in many ways, so I get how hard it can be.

When you get clear on the things you want and think about them in a positive way, amazing things will happen, things you cannot anticipate or figure out right now, especially from a space charged with negativity and doubt.

So, the next time find yourself not liking something, think about what you would prefer to have, be or do and laser in on that. Once you start paying attention to your thoughts, you will be astounded to realize how little time you actually spend thinking about what you want and how much is spent thinking about what you do not. Only when the balance shifts to the former most of the time, will you begin to see any changes. Trust me on this one.

When People Make You Feel Guilty for Pursuing Your Own Happiness

Guilt is a low energy emotion. A lot of things that make us feel guilty really should not, but our crappy programming and belief that we should never be too concerned about our own happiness weaken our defense against this feeling. One of the biggest barriers to pursing what we want in life is other people, whether it is family, friends or just society at large. In your pursuit of happiness and well-being, you may upset some people with your decisions and they are going to make you feel badly. It is important to defend yourself against this at all costs or you will end up living your life for other people.

Know That No One is Responsible for Anyone Else’s Happiness

You are not responsible for anyone’s happiness nor is anyone responsible for yours. Happiness comes from the inside and no matter all the wonderful people you have in your life, all the money ,the great job and anything else on the outside, none of it will matter if we do not address our internal issues. We put too much stock in other people to provide for our happiness all the time. That is why we have such a hard time getting over a break up, even if we know this person was the worst possible match for us. That is why parents lay guilt trips on their kids all the time; they expect that their children owe them for all the sacrifice required of raising them and all of their choices should be of benefit to them.

I am not saying screw everyone and do what you want with no regard for anyone else. I am not talking about doing things that are truly hurting other people. What I am saying is that you should not feel guilty about doing what makes you happy simply because someone else does not like it.

Because nothing outside of us can ever make us happy, you giving in to someone else’s desires will not do much anyway. No one else is ever someone else’s key to happiness, well being and peace of mind. If anyone is trying to make you feel like you are responsible for making them happy, know they are in the wrong, not you.

Distinguish Between Truly Hurting Someone or Merely Upsetting Them

So many people fail to do what they truly want in life because of other people. We are made to feel guilty for wanting anything for ourselves; we are taught to always put other people’s needs before our own. I call bullshit on this one. Again, I am not talking about being a total a-hole and stepping over others to fulfill all your whims. I am not talking about letting your children starve so you can get a manicure. I am talking about the things that we want that will not truly not hurt anyone; the things that are perfectly okay to want for yourself; the things that upset people because pursing your needs will interfere with their needs and they do not like that.

I know it is hard to face opposition to our choices, to hear that other people do not like them and wish we would do something else, but that is their problem not yours. As long as you are not truly hurting anyone, you should do whatever you want. Remember, no one is responsible for anyone else’s happiness.

People’s Criticisms of You Have Nothing to Do With You

Whenever we find ourselves being judgmental or critical of others, we know deep down it has nothing to do with that person and it is all about us and our issues. If people are giving you flack for your life choices, it is because they are unhappy with theirs, plain and simple. If we can remember this, it will make it a lot easier to do what we want in life because we will know all the junk coming from everyone else is all about them and nothing about us.

What the Death of My Father Taught Me About Dealing With Grief

Life is full of loss. This is not to sound pessimistic , because I am surely not that type of person. It is just a reality that we face. Relationships end. Friends betray us and we may no longer speak to them. People we love die, sometimes long before we expect them to. I have experienced all kinds of loss in my life, but the most difficult has been the death of my father. He was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer when he was only in his late 50’s. Other than the fact that he smoked, he was very healthy and vibrant and had he not had that nasty habit, he probably would have lived a long, healthy life.

I started grieving his death even before he died because at the stage of his diagnosis, I knew the end was coming sooner than later. He really started to suffer near the end and when he actually died, the primary emotion I felt was relief. From the day I found out he was sick until right before he died, my days were filled with constant fear and anxiety of thinking about what was happening, of fearing one of the things we fear most—the death of our parents. I was in a bad state of mind almost constantly.

I was devastated of course, but after experiencing such high-charged emotions, the feeling of it being over and him being gone and finally at peace was a whole different realm. I just felt sad and kind of empty. He died in June 2008 and I still think about him every day. Sometimes, the feelings are as raw as if it just happened. Sometimes I still feel this sense of shock, like I cannot believe it actually happened. His death triggered a lot of changes in me and in many ways, my life is better than it ever has been, but I carry that sadness with me always.

We just want the sadness to go away, but it probably will always stay with us so the key is finding ways to deal with it. It is okay to feel sad. It is okay to grieve. We do not just have to ‘’get over it.’’ But, we need to find ways to carry that grief without it overwhelming us, without it making us bitter about life. We have to find a way to keep the bad things that happen to us from defining us and our existence.

Accept that Your Life Will Never Be Perfect

I am very into personal development and for the longest time, I had this idea that I could create some perfect life. When my father got sick and died, that definitely put a kink in my plans. How could I have a perfect life when I lost one of the people I love most in my life way too early? How could I be happy with such a huge hole in my heart? I had a lot of anxiety about that, that I would never have that perfect life, that complete and utter happiness would elude me. Over the years, I have finally learned that there is no such thing as perfect, that being happy is not about having a perfect life, but that being happy is about the choices we make and how we choose to deal with the circumstances of our life, not the actual circumstances.

Accepting the imperfection of our existence makes it easier to deal with the death of my father because I realize that I can still be happy while still carrying around sadness. I realize that being a happy person is not about being happy all the time or having nothing to be sad about. Accepting things as they are can take us a long way in dealing with the unpleasant aspects of our life.

We can grieve for the people we lose and for the type of life we will never have due to the losses we experience, but it does not have to keep us from being happy with the life we have now.

Stop Thinking that Bad Things Should Not Happen

Bad things happen all the time. We witness it every day. We know this. Yet, when they actually happen to us, we cannot believe they actually occurred. We have this idea that bad things happening are unfair and that they should not befall us. While thinking this way is understandable, our resistance to bad things and our refusal to accept them as part of our lives makes it a lot harder to deal with issues like the death of people close to us. On top of feeling badly about the loss, we feel all these negative emotions about it being unfair, about not understanding it, about thinking that they should not happen.

I study Buddhism and one of the core tenets is this acceptance. I still feel great sadness over the death of my father and I think it sucks that me and my family had to go through all of that. But, when I learned to give up my resistance to not wanting to experience bad things, dealing with the bad things, like losing my dad, became easier. I was able to carry around my grief better, I did not resist it as much.

Let Yourself Feel Your Feelings Without Judgment

While I think about my father every day, I find my emotional responses kind of come in waves. I can go a long time without really feeling anything intensely. Then there are other times I cry like it just happened. Strange things will spark these intense reactions.My father always used to wear Chapstick brand lip balm and I remember he would kiss me good bye before going to work ;I always associated that smell with him. One time someone near me was wearing it and I could smell it, and intense sadness washed over me; I felt this overwhelming urge to cry so once I got some privacy, that is exactly what I did. Simply smelling a certain smell brought me back to very specific memories and it was almost too much to handle.

The last couple of days of my father’s life were spent in hospital bed on a morphine drip; so many awful memories that did not really affect me until much later after he died. Every once in a while, I will think of those terrible 48 hours and it is an intense sadness, thinking of his suffering. I will get powerful flashbacks of certain things that happened in that room. I hate dwelling on it but I feel better when I let myself cry and feel the anguish instead of telling myself to shake it off since it happened over four years ago.

Feelings of grief can be really intense and we would rather not feel them sometimes, but in my experience, letting myself experience them helps me. Do not judge your feelings. Do not feel stupid if something like smelling Chapstick makes you want to cry for a loved one you have lost. We intensify our pain when we do not let it out. I know it is scary sometimes, but if we can let ourselves have those uncomfortable moments, we can truly heal.

Law of Attraction:The Discomfort That Can Accompany Actually Getting What You Want

There are things we do not like about our lives and we desperately want to change them. We need more money. We are sick of having one bad relationship after the other. We want to find a job more in line with our passions and talents. Not having these things makes us feel crappy and we think of how much better we would feel if we had them. We set intentions to get these things. We do the mental work. We just want to the bad feelings to go away and for the good feelings to take their place. Then, gradually, things begin to change in our life, or not so gradually sometimes.

Awesome, right? We should be feeling great and we probably are a lot of the time, but we may also feel a bit uncomfortable. We spent so much time and energy in trying to create these things and once they are ours, we may feel like we are a bit lost. We may feel a bit scared at our own power. We finally see the degree to which we are responsible for the circumstances of our lives and we can no longer hide behind our excuses.

We become very identified with the circumstances of our life and even if they are not ideal and we do not like them, they are comfortable and we get used to feeling badly. It is not until the situation changes that we realize how attached we were to these things being a part of us and we might not know who we are anymore. If you were the girl who was always unlucky in love, who are you now that you have found the ideal boyfriend? If you were the person who could never get ahead financially and was always living paycheck to paycheck, busting your ass, who are you now that you have attracted lucrative money-making opportunities that allow you to work a fraction of the time you were previously working? If you were the person who prided themselves on being cynical and negative because you were just being ‘’realistic’’, who are you now that you have changed your outlook on life and who is actually happy?

Now that you have these new things and you see how much your life has improved, you may develop a fear of losing them and having to go back to the living the life you were desperately trying to change.

For awhile, I was in dire financial circumstances. I became too comfortable with one source of income that was technically freelance, but that offered so much work, hundreds, if not thousands of writers, were able to make full-time income for several years. The company was undergoing some major changes and virtually overnight, this heavily relied upon source of income was basically gone and I was screwed. Not being the best saver, I probably had a couple of hundred dollars in my bank account. I was living off my credit cards…trying to find a brick and mortar job was not an option at this time. I was sick to my stomach with worry every day, wondering how I was going to make money. The blessing of this situation though, was that I was forced to up my personal development work exponentially and that is what I spent a good chunk of my time doing every day.

As I strengthened my magnet, opportunities began to rush into my life faster than I ever could have imagined. These gigs would allow me to make more money than I ever have since I started doing freelance/contractor-type stuff while working far, far less. On one hand it was awesome ,but on the other hand, it made me kind of anxious. I was no longer the girl who had no money, now I was the girl who could make a lot of money doing what I loved to do without having to kill myself. The transition was fast and it threw me a bit. I was so used to being broke, having the amount of money I had was weird to me. I was worried it would go away. I finally started to see that we can truly attract anything we want and that our previous experience in no ways sets the barometer for what is possible.

If you are feeling uncomfortable with your new found successes, you are not alone. I know how you feel and it is normal, even if it seems strange to us. But, we humans are a funny bunch and our deep conditioning that life is supposed to be a difficult struggle, that we are supposed to not really be that happy, that we need to settle for good enough, that only the lucky get what they want, that the other shoe is eventually going to drop can start to rear its head big time when things start going your way. Just do your best to dismiss this stuff when it comes up and do whatever you can to fill your mind with the good stuff that led you to make these changes in the first place.