Hi – yesterday I met with someone I trained with last year. We got on (and continue to get on) really well, partly due to our Greek heritage and partly due to us being keen students of hypnotism for healing. This meeting reminded me of many things, but importantly – to be happy never criticize anything.

We were discussing the nature of healing, me saying it was partly due to the fact that we were sending healing intention and energy (irrespective of the actual techniques used) and Helen reminded me about taking time to get into a state of love and compassion before treating someone. Wow – I can’t believe I’d forgotten that.

I have spent the last year making my days more productive and rushing from training to teaching to therapy to meetings and…….forgetting to get into the right (psychological) place before each one of these experiences.

The other thing that all this reminded me of was the fact that I had started criticizing things I didn’t agree with again. It is such a negative. It doesn’t do anything but keep you in a place where things for you to criticize keep come at you!

Sure – things like injustice, deceit and dishonesty happen and are not especially joy inducing, but criticizing these does nothing but bring more of it into your reality. Think about it…..

You attract more of what you dwell on friends…….be joyful at all times!

Namaste.

Hello friends – its been some time……..

One of the reasons I haven’t posted for a while is I’ve been working on some business ideas. When you are considering how to attract wealth, one fundamental method is to respond to your ideas. I had been pursuing other people’s paths to prosperity (it worked for them I reasoned) and letting my own sit on the back burner. This hasn’t worked for me.

It sounds simple but many of us don’t respond to our ideas. The universe responds to you, therefore to keep in alignment you must respond to it – you must respond to the idea that comes from you and do the work that cleans up any doubt, any resistance!

Now, I know that lots of people are successful in the same areas of work – say property,  internet marketing etc. It all depends on your rockets of desire and what keeps you in alignment.

When you send out your rockets of desire (I want more wealth, a new partner, a different job etc) the universe hears you – as long as you dwell on the desire for more than 16 seconds and inject some emotion into the desire – i.e. as long as you feel how it would be to have achieved that desire. The universe begins to re-order your reality so you can attain that desire.

So, if your desire is to attract wealth then it will send your unconscious mind ideas that can realize that desire. This is when your big idea comes to you.

Unfortunately, what a lot of us do is respond to our conditioning and not the universe. “That’s too hard.” Or “It will never work.” Or “It can’t be that easy.” and so on. STOP! You must listen to these ideas – this is your pathway to prosperity. This is the law of attraction in action.

Of course, you then don’t sit around and wait for piles of cash to drop into your lap, although the Law of Attraction does follow that if you totally believe without any doubt whatsoever that this will happen, it will (as in a totally unexpected windfall). For most of us who have been brought up in western society consciousness, we simply go through the usual business practice of due diligence – research, planning, assembling key people etc. But if you truly want to attract wealth you must follow through with the idea if your research shows that it is at all possible. The only thing that can go wrong is that at any point you doubt that it is possible, because then you are attracting doubt…..

Remember, the law of attraction is more about the thought then the action. The actions will be a product of what’s needed to achieve the desire and if you remain positive that you will achieve it, and remain in alignment, none of it will be a chore….in fact, it will be easy.

In summary – if you truly want something you haven’t got, and you send out the desire with feeling, listen for ideas and ACT on them. It has to work. Life is meant to be good.

Go for it.

Best,

John

Hi – it’s been a little while since I’ve blogged because I’ve been doing too much! Yep – and because I’ve  given myself so much to do, I’ve ended up in a slight state of overwhelm, and that demotivates me to do much at all towards my business goals, so I just do the things that make me feel good, which is not a bad thing, but will I reach my goals this way……..

Sound familiar?

Well, perhaps the guitar and football aren’t but if you are passionate about life, perhaps achieving things and so on, it is easy to forget some basic rules of success, which I’m going to remind both of us about.

The Chinese have a saying (they have lots of sayings – do you think its because life is easier explained in sayings and metaphors….). The more you do, the more you are likely to do wrong.

I don’t believe that by saying this they are advocating laziness. I think this gets back to our basic rules of success. Follow One Course Until Successful. Yes, FOCUS! It is so easy when you are interested in this and interested in that to pursue them, and why not – after all, life is for living. But there comes a time when prioritising must happen.

So, how do we do it?

Well, try this. Think about all the things you do for work or pursue with interest, and ask yourself which ones of these would you really want to still be doing in 5 years. (Gulp! Looks like my last season of cricket).

For me, I have a lot of different jobs and artistic and entrepreneurial endeavours, and up until recently have enjoyed life like this, but lately it seems more and more hectic. So, I have to lose some things and the obvious ones to go are the ones that don’t fit in with my 5 year plans.

So, I guess the first thing is to set some long, medium and short-term goals. Check in as to what is not there in the long-term and drop it soon so you can focus on what’s really important. I found, doing a goal-setting session recently that I completely forgot something that I was putting a lot of time and energy into. Says it all really.

Have fun with it friends. As Esther Hicks puts it, start enjoying the moulding of the clay…….

Namaste,

John

I know a lot of people write about this topic but, as it came up last week in conversation with a wonderfully talented friend, I thought I’d add to the conversations around finding out what is your passion and then whether you can be financially secure pursuing your passion.

Passion or Fashion????

My friend and I were talking about the overiding need in many of us to make sure that our families are supported and financially secure. Is it possible to do both? Follow your passion and make a good living? It’s been pointed out by many (I did a bit of research and it is a pretty even split – perhaps slightly tipped towards passion will find a way) that one doesn’t naturally beget the other but I think this is where the Law of Attraction comes in. If you are following your passion and are in alignment, the money energy should flow…..

I know a few artists, musicians and writers who feel that money (or the pursuit of money) is somehow impure. It sullies them – can lead to commercialism in their work and so on. It’s kind of understandable – some of the greatest heroes and spiritual people did and do what they did and do (I wish I could have put that better) because of their passion and belief, not for reward. We also know that if you keep your eye too closely on the destination you can lose sight of the journey, make a wrong turn and end up in the wrong place!

But that’s not too hard a thing to guard against and it seems pretty straightforward when you lay it out.

• Be clear on where you’re going and what you are doing
• Stay totally focused on the now, revelling in the enjoyment of those moments of creation
• Don’t think about any financial outcome, only an artistic one.

‘The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become‘ — Charles Du Bos

You see, Law of Attraction is a law of abundance. As we look around we see abundance everywhere (and deprivation as well, but that’s another story. Although, imagine how many people you could help if you allowed more abundance into your life!) and the Law of Attraction states quite clearly that life is meant to be good. It is meant to be fun. We should do things based on how we think they will feel and not on whether we can afford it. It feels so alien to the common handed-down view that life is a bit of a struggle and you must work hard for the things you want and so on. Its just not true. This may be a reason why many rich people’s families continue to do well. They believe it is easy and quite natural to be prosperous.

Feel how these words resonate within you. It’s a struggle. It’s not that easy just doing what you love. I have a family to support. Things are a bit tight – and so on. They just feel…….well, tough!

Now feel these words. I so love it when I paint/draw/play music/write. I always end up finding the money. Money is easy to come by. My family know how important it is to feel good in life. We always do good things.  How do those statements feel?

The hardest part is dispelling any doubt that these statements are true – but, they feeeeeeel so much better than the first statement. The thing is, if you believed they were true -  they would become…….well, true.

I used to holiday in an area in Northen NSW called the promised land. It had the most perfect micro-climate and the fields were lush and the trees were tall and strong and so on. The cattle and sheep got to graze on this absolute, god-given abundance and were the most well-fed, healthy beasts you could see. The very idea that they would stop and say, “Hang on guys, were just in this for the grass.” and then deny themselves the abundance on offer just sounds crazy. But this is what a lot of artists do….

Money is an energy. You either allow it to flow into your reality or you don’t, and mostly that comes down to how you feel about it. It’s like this saying, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Try this…..Money isn’t bad, it’s the worshipping of it that leads to greed that is bad. Does that make more sense?

So, when you decide to do the thing you love more than any other thing, and an idea pops into your head saying, this would be good and lots of people might go for this – it’s probably the universe sending you the abundance clue. Act on it! Do some research, make a plan and allocate some time to it. Think of the freedom to be a pure artist more than the ‘only greedy people are rich’ false stereotype that some people are indoctrinated into – and never doubt for a moment that things will work out……

What’s the worst that could happen -  a few months doing what you love most. Doesn’t sound too bad to me…….

My best,

John

Hi everyone – today I want to talk about something that is at the heart of the workings of the Law of Attraction. This is resistance. When you are resistant to success what it really should be called is resistance to allowing. You are not allowing your real success to happen.

First, let’s identify what it is. If we see life as a river of energy, it follows that it is easy to just flow along with the current, ‘to go with the flow’. This is how life is meant to be – the path of least resistance. We are effectively riding the river of life towards our desires (…..As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.”– Julia Cameron) and everything goes along just fine until you try to swim upstream – until you try to swim against the current.

And how do you know when that is?

Whenever you feel that emotional twinge in your front (usually around your heart), that is you pinching yourself off from allowing yourself to connect with your desires – connect with your fortune, your fantastic relationship, your new career. It is when you are not a vibrational match with your desires. A resistance has been created in your unconscious that says ‘….but I can’t do that or have that because….’. Sometimes it may just be to screw something up so that you can prove to yourself that you’re no good at it. In coaching terms it is the classic self-sabotage.

So, in terms of the Law of Attraction, we feel a negative emotional charge (resistance), we then respond in a pre-programmed way based on our beliefs, which are borne out of a repetition of thought, and then use that as evidence to confirm that we aren’t good at it – or, as many people say, ‘it just wasn’t meant to be’. Now, I don’t know if it was meant to be or it wasn’t – but I do know that if you want it, why shouldn’t you have it.

The other thing you do of course is create an emotional battle inside, and by giving that resistance 16 seconds of airtime, you have put it out into the universe once more and there you stand, desperate to be who you really are and doing everything you can to resist allowing it!

In Tai Chi when you resist an opponent you immediately alert them to what you’ve got – to what you’re doing or about to do, so you never resist – you always yield. Then they have no idea what is coming up. No matter how hard someone pushes at you, if you can totally yield, there is no issue, no attention, no energy use. It passes as its meant to, like the 20,000 other stimuli that happen every moment.

In life when you yield, you may not always end up exactly where you wanted to be, but it’s the ride not the destination that is the fun. I don’t mean that when someone is trying to take advantage of you, you simply allow them to. I mean, when someone is trying to take advantage of you and you yield, they have no idea that you know they are trying to take advantage of you. It’s a very different position.

How to deal with this? I’ll tell you next time.

My best,

John

Hi everyone – I saw something this morning which reminded me how important work on positive aspects is – so thought I would share (or remind my fellow Abers). I have used this process to clear painful blockages around past experiences and significant people. It is so simple yet so elegant – you’ll love it I hope.

What happened was  I started thinking about the things that were not pleasing me about a subject (and a person to be honest) and suddenly stopped and thought, ‘Hey, I’m only going to get more of THAT if I keep thinking about it!’ I was starting to fall into the trap of allowing the tiny bit I didn’t like to become everything. The other issue is this, ‘I don’t like this and I don’t like that’ stuff. What are we attracting with this thinking?

It is a fundamental of the Law of Attraction work we do on ourselves in order to become who we really are that we always look for the best feeling thought in anything. If we keep seeing the problems with our local services, our bank, the tax system, disorganized suppliers, chaotic transport systems and so on, we will get more of these problems. It just has to be. The idea that if you focus on something that is wrong you will be able to fix it by understanding it better simply doesn’t work. While you are writing the 10 letters to everyone who will listen about the state of the potholes (or whatever), all you are noticing in your world is potholes, and the notion that this will make potholes go away doesn’t stack up at all. How can it?

Our historians spend much of their time looking at wars, explaining that if we look at history it will prevent it from happening again. It’s clear the opposite is true. The time spent looking at the history of the troubles in the Middle East for example, has done extremely little in my (uninformed) view to stop it. In fact, as far as I can tell, the same things keep happening!

I have a friend who is a counsellor and is very attractive and intelligent. She currently isn’t in a relationship and would like to be in one, but believes she has to understand what has gone wrong with the past ones in order to be able to move forward. So she analyzes her past (failed) relationships for clues. Do you think this will work? Maybe – but I doubt it. All she does is give herself evidence that there is something not right with her and relationships because, as she is the common denominator, she can only infer that she has the problem.

How crazy (and commonplace) does that sound? She attracts the outcome (or the partner) by thinking about the past, which includes poor choices and breakups, and then uses that as evidence that she isn’t right for a relationship. What is the best feeling thought here? Not that one I suggest.

Ok, back to positive aspects. When do we do the process I am about to describe? Whenever you are thinking about the bad points of something or someone. Obviously, you stop thinking about it as soon as you realize (hopefully before 16 secs – because that’s when the universe pays attention to it) and make a note to work on that or do the process at the time.

Here’s what to do. Write across the top of a page The Positive Aspects of ……………………Are, filling in the blank with a person’s name or an area of life, and spend the next however long writing down all you can think of in the positive. It may not be easy at first for some people or areas but keep at it. Be creative and look for the best feeling thought. I did this for a family member and after 5 minutes all I had was ‘he’s tall’. After 15 minutes I had a half a page and physically and emotionally felt the blockage clear.

This is a great process. Please try it  and comment on how it has worked for you so that others may be inspired to do the work. Remember to write down the positive aspects rather than just think them – it does make a difference!

Lots of love,

John

It is a fundamental of the Law of Attraction to work on feeling good. This means that in order to be who we really are, we look for the best feeling thought in every life experience. There are many ways to keep feeling good but here are 2 that I think are worth examining again. This is why……

If you had one goal, and that was to feel good, you would never again need to hear another word from anyone. You would live successfully and happily and in a way of fulfilling your life’s purpose ever after. — Abraham

So, the obvious next part of this feeling good business is to reflect on those feelings that aren’t very good. Why? So you’ll know where there is resistance in you being who you really are. Do the search for the best feeling thought at the time (because by doing this you are short circuiting the ‘thought leads to feeling’ process) but don’t work on cleaning up that disturbance until you are feeling good again. (See my earlier post about always taking on enemies from a position of strength.)

Remember friends if you want change, do changework. It does happen all by itself, but you can make it happen more quickly by reflecting (not dwelling), cleaning up and meditating.

I don’t get annoyed much anymore – but I do very occasionally and don’t know whether its because I don’t get annoyed very much that when I do, I really go. But I DO know when I reflect on it, that most times I have seen a quality in another person that I don’t like in myself (or has been an issue about me for a significant other). In effect, I am annoyed and shouting at myself! (Following on from this, it’s easy to see that setting a chair up opposite you and imagining you’re in it, and having a good rant at yourself can be excellent home-made therapy. If you try it, please comment back. I’d love to hear about it)

I avoid the news now, and whenever I see politicians interviewed I am mainly watching their eye-accessing cues (see earlier post). One reason I’m avoiding it is that the media is pushing an agenda that I’m not interested in buying into and the other is that one of the things that used to annoy me about myself was I felt I was too opinionated. Watching and listening to opinionated people (who make good TV and radio) just wound me up – I started feeling less good.

So, number 1 was: Getting annoyed. Check in and see whether its something you don’t like about yourself (be totally honest). Reach for the best feeling thought and deal with it when strong – so make a note of it.

The next way  is the 80-20 rule I’ve also spoken about in earlier posts. This is really important to feeling good and we do it often – that’s why I’m repeating it in this context. What is it? We focus on the 20% that we aren’t fond of instead of the 80% we are and then say everything’s wrong. We generalize and then believe its fact! I have a friend who told me the other day that everyone thinks his idea (that I didn’t agree with) is good. I asked how many people that was, he said around a hundred. I pushed a little harder, it turned out to be around 12. He earnestly claimed that everyone thought it was a great idea and that was 12 people. We get a bit of evidence and make it into everything. Here’s the facts as I see them.

Nothing is broken (apart from our  idea of it)

Everything has some merit (you just have to look for a positive aspect and appreciate it)

We give meaning to everything that happens to us (which often creates the very emotion we are complaining about)

We have a tendency to focus on the things we see as wrong (to the exclusion of a lot else)

So, there you are friends; 2 Ways to Keep Feeling Good. Number 1: See if the thing that annoys you about something else is something that annoys you about yourself and work on it when strong. Number 2: Check in and see whether you are turning the 20% into the 80% and look to focus on the 80%

My best,

John

Hi everyone – its been a week or so but a session with a client inspired me to write this about the seeds of doubt.

The client is doing really well. In only a couple of weeks this very able, sincere person has completely ceased the behaviour that was causing the problems in life and has already had a couple of successful experiences in the ‘trigger’ situations where they would normally have turned to this coping behaviour.

So, with 5 minutes to go I absentmindedly asked, “Is there anything that has come up in the past week that you want to talk about?” Why, oh why did I ask it? Have you guessed what happened next? After a shuffle of discomfort in the chair (the body is always talking), I was told that occasional doubts popped into this client’s mind about whether things would stay this good or whether the client would descend back to the behaviour.

Aaarrggghhh! We just alerted the universe to it! Quick, think of something else.

Here is how Abraham sees it. ‘You don’t have to protect yourself from anything! In fact, an attitude of protection will surely bring you to the vibration of the thing from which you’re protecting yourself. Because you can’t look at something and say, “Oh no, I’m saying a prayer to protect myself from you,” without achieving vibrational harmony with “you”, whatever you are.’ — Abraham

When you sow the seed of doubt you are also watering them!

I know it’s not always that straightforward to ‘just think of something else’ but you have to find a way to! This client threw an enormous anchor to his past and dragged the self doubt, which was one of the things behind the behaviour, back into his current reality. A brief aside here; the behaviour is not the problem, the behaviour is how we have selected (unconsciously) to cope with the problem (too much food, drugs, alcohol, violence, sex etc.). The problem is usually a deep seated fear and is usually ‘that we won’t be loved’ or we ‘won’t be enough/good enough’.

It’s about telling the story that you want for your life friends, not the one you used to tell that gave you a lot of the psychological baggage you are dealing with today.

Just remember, if you think about it for more than 16 seconds, you send up a flare to the Universe. Do it three times for that length of time and you’ve said, “I want this in my life!” Its only about 70 seconds before you become a complete vibrational match to that desire (although you don’t see it as a desire, your unconscious mind does, otherwise why would you be thinking of it?).

So, stop complaining. Stop looking back. Never criticize yourself. Never judge others. Clean up any negative emotion that comes up (it tells you of resistance). And tell the story of how you want it to be – not the story of how it was!

When you can manage that, you will be the real you – it has to be……………

My best,

John

Hi again – do you know that so much happens to you when you are allowing your expansion? What I mean by this is, when you put your wants out to the universe (send out rockets of desire) and allow yourself to explore that expansion rather than dismiss it, things start happening in those directions. This is because of your individual power. I had such a great day of meetings today where things happened that I put out to the universe some months ago and the wheels are now turning – really turning.

Its a fact that some people aren’t comfortable with change, which is a little odd because everything is changing all the time.

We often forget that we are powerful co-creators of our reality and we can influence the universe with our thoughts. One of the reasons we forget is because we believe things happen to us rather than we allow things into our reality by thinking about them. They only exist because we line up our vibration with these things by turning our attention to them. Imagine how wonderful it would be to be able to only turn your attention to what you want.

Here is a quote from Abraham…

We want to help you regain clarity about your individual power. Everyone has it. No one can ever take it away from you. No one can ever do anything “bad” to you. No one can assert into your experience. Everything, without exception, comes only by your individual invitation to it. Do you understand the process of asking? When you give something your attention and it becomes your dominant vibration relative to the subject–that is your asking. So, deliberate creating is not so much about looking out into the world and saying, “Oh, there are things that are good that I want to create or attract into my experience, and there are things that are bad that I don’t want to create or attract into my experience.” Deliberate creating is more about deliberate allowing. Deliberate allowing is more like deliberate vibration. — Abraham

Excerpted from the workshop in San Francisco, CA on Saturday, March 8th, 2003 #436

This quick post is here to remind you that your attention is your individual power and turning your attention to what you want is the only way you can be, do or have anything. So, whenever you find you have turned your attention to what you don’t want, move that attention to the good feeling part of that thought, the opposite part – the part you want.

Namaste,

John

Firstly, Happy Mother’s Day to all Australian mums (I just called mine).

I was just perusing Facebook and Garry Ridge, a great Aussie and a very old friend (we went to Primary School together!), had just posted this quote, “May I never miss a sunset or a rainbow because I am looking down.”– Sara June Parker. It reminded me about how we can easily change our state if we don’t look down (also good for tight-rope walking). The ‘keep your chin up‘ mantra has a firm psychological dimension to it. I wrote of this at length in terms of depression but this post is more about a quick fix – what NLP (brief therapy) is great at.

Since the turn of the century it has been researched and considered that involuntary eye movements either influence or are influenced by your psychological state. NLP formalized this with the study called eye-accessing cues.

It is more or less universally accepted that we have a representational system for all our subjective experiences (real and imagined) and our eye movements indicate the particular access route for that area of our life. Simply put, we grab information from our various ‘maps of our world’ and our eye movements describes what road we go along to get there. Here is a diagram of the eye patterns and a description from Wikipedia

The most common arrangement for eye accessing cues in a right-handed person.

Note: – NLP does not say it is ‘always’ this way, but rather that one should check whether reliable correlations seem to exist for an individual, and if so what they are

Common (but not universal) Western layout of eye accessing cues:

• Upwards (left/right) — Visual (V) — “I can imagine the big picture“
• Level (left/right) — Auditory (A) — “Let’s tone down the discussion“
• Down-right — Kinesthetic (K) — “to grasp a concept” or “to gather you’ve understood.”
• Down-left Auditory internal dialogue (A^id) — talking to oneself inside

Eye movement to the left or right for many people seems to indicate if a memory was recalled or constructed. Thus remembering an actual image (V^r) is associated more with up-left, whilst imagining one’s dream home (V^c) tends (again not universally) to be more associated with up-right.

Back to me.

These eye accessing cues are not absolute and are contextual. In fact they often move through a sequence (like a route), for example, ‘When I watch fish in a tank it really makes me feel calm’ or ‘When I hear the sound of the sea at night, it makes me feel sleepy.’ This is a movement from Visual to Kinaesthetic and Audio to Kinaesthetic respectively. We have these ‘strategies’ (maps) and associated eye movements for everything we do in our lives; Shopping, loving, eating etc. Our world may be fine but if we have a bad map (strategy) for some aspect of our life, the actions in that area will be governed by that map and may not be too great. This is where an NLP coach or therapist can help by ‘re-mapping’ your strategy.

When we are ‘down’ (love that metaphor), we tend to look down, usually moving from right to left – from feelings to internal dialogue. We are accessing our feelings and talking to ourselves about those feelings road map. The main point of this post is to tell you that these things aren’t fixed. Our strategies can change quite often and work done has shown us that if we change our physiology, we can change our states.

So, if you are feeling a little ‘down’, lift your head and look out as if over the horizon is the next great thing to happen in your life, and notice how your mood begins to change. I guarantee it.

My best,

John