NaturallyResilient

You Do Have Free Will

By Ann on Saturday, August 14th, 2010 | No Comments

I have been thinking a lot about free will lately. That term has always confused me in the way it is used in theology but I think I am finally making sense of the term with my investigation of the ‘law of attraction’ and manifesting.

Let’s review; we are spiritual beings who are basically made of energy. If you look at the smallest physical particle of matter then look deeper past the atom past the electron you will finally get to pure energy and that is what everything is including you and me.
Since the only thing that truly exist is energy what are our thoughts? Energy of course.

Our thoughts go out and solidify into substance. The more energy (passion, effort or even continual thought) you put into something the faster it will solidify and materialize.
How does this relate to free will? You are free to think what you want, free to experience the emotions you want. You are free to send out your thoughts and create whatever you wish. This free will perpetuates itself because what you think the most about will draw those experiences and things to you to reinforce those thoughts. So you create your life through your thoughts and your free will. God wants you to use your free will otherwise God would not have given it to you.

This is a case of be careful what you wish for (or think about). When you dwell on the negative in your life you create more of it.

This is where free will gets sticky and the theological idea of “Your will not mine” comes into play. I firmly believe that God wants us to live a passionate life, one that is true to who we really are. If we are in alignment with who we truly are, then we are in alignment with God’s will. We often get sidetracked about who we are. We often insist that we are helpless, or a victim, or miserable because we have bought into what someone in the past told us or you have let a past experience tell you that is who you are now. No that was who you were then. Each moment is a different choice and you get to choose.

Events That Change Your Life

By Ann on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 | No Comments

I am reading Earnest Hemingway’s book The Old Man and the Sea.In my 50 + years I have never read that book. It popped up on my son’s reading list for next year so I decided I better read it so we could discuss it. In a way it is a strange book in that it involves a different culture than we in the United States live in; a simpler life, a life that involves getting up, drinking some coffee and going to work. No spouse, no children (except the boy who was apprenticed to the Old Man, a very helpful child), coming home eating a little, maybe reading the paper and going to sleep. It is a rather predictable life, one without very many obligations. But even in that life, he is still hit with a major life challenge. He wrestles with a huge fish and after catching it and strapping it to his boat the sharks come up and eat it! All he takes home is a skeleton. How ironic.

Is his life really that different from our daily lives? We get up and usually have a more elaborate morning routine than just drinking coffee. Then we go to work and wrestle with problems and people (usually not fish). Every once in a while we have a major event in our lives, a dark day of the soul if you like, that we have to wrestle with and either come out victorious or it kills us; it may not kill us literally but it may kill our spirit.

Usually these types of events end up changing the person involved. The involved person, evolves. This is where Hemingway lost his chance at a more in depth character development. How did this experience change the old man?

This idea of character change is very interesting to me. Jane Austin does a good job of showing the evolution of her characters in her book Sense & Sensibility.That is one of my favorite books because it portrays real well how a person is always growing and changing as they work through the major challenges in his/her life.

Don’t think of the hardships in your life as limiting you. Think of them as changing you so you will be better equipped to change your world.

Working Through It

By Ann on Sunday, August 1st, 2010 | No Comments

Shakti Gawain has a couple of workbooks that I have used in the past and continue to use even now. I bought Living in the Light Workbook (which is actually a supplement to her Living in the Light: A Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformationbook) and The Creative Visualization Workbook (which is a supplement to the book Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life (Gawain, Shakti)) when I was going through a yearlong depression in 1992. I was seeing a psychologist but it was not work with her that made the breakthrough it was my work through these workbooks that had the most impact.

In Living in the Light Workbook: Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformation, Shakti leads you through a number of exercises to help you access your intuition. In our western world we are often taught to ignore our intuition from an early age. This intuition is very valuable and really needs to be a part of your life. This workbook requires a lot of writing and some drawing but it is great at accessing your intuition in a number of areas of your life and through different techniques. Some of the section headings are “The World as our Mirror”, “Feelings”, “and Daily Life” etc.

The Creative Visualization Workbook: Second Edition (Gawain, Shakti) provides a lot of examples and some simple techniques leading you through the creative visualization process. The book is divided into 5 sections with each section leading you through different areas of you life such as setting goals, clearing out negative belief systems, looking at each individual area of your life and connecting with your intuition and creativity. This is meant to be a fun workbook and it is.

If you are searching for answers in your life, these are some great workbooks to use.

Five Ways to Prevent Worry

By Ann on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 | No Comments

OK worry is bad for you. This is the general worry that freezes your mind and sends you in a panic. Some worry is helpful. Helpful worry like helpful fear is that which spurs you to action; such as a child falls in the pool and can’t swim, the fear and worry causes you to dive in after them.

No the worry I am talking about is that which limits your view; you can’t see a positive future in fact you may not see any future at all. This is the worry that stifles and prevents action. This type of worry often feeds off of itself; one worry leads to another, snowballing to the point that you give up.

How do you drag yourself out of such a place without spending a fortune on therapy? I have some suggestions.

1. Start every day by reading something positive. You can even read the same book or chapter or poem everyday. The prime requirement is that it is uplifting. No downers. Some suggested reading material is listed at the end of this article. If you are not into reading, there are many audio tapes out there with uplifting material.

2. Reaffirm you faith and belief. If you affiliate yourself with a spiritual belief, remember it. When I was going through a rough time of worry I realized I was not practicing my faith. If I truly believed what I said I believed then I had to exercise that faith. The belief that I exercised was that all things work toward good and that God would take care of me. I also believed that God wants to give you good things. When ever I start to feel down or start to worry about bills or finances I turn back to that belief and feeling that I will be taken care of, and guess what, I have been taken care of. Have hope in the future.

3. Go for a walk. The exercise will do you good, but don’t just walk, look around you. Look at the trees, the clouds, the animals and feel gratitude for each of them. In sending the gratitude you are reinitiating the energy flow that worry has choked off. Keep the energy flowing through out the day by looking up and being grateful for what ever your eyes see. Try and really feel the gratitude.

4. Talk to your spirit guides. We all have them and they really want to help but they cannot help if you don’t give them permission. Just talk to them like you would a friend you are telling your troubles to, or you could just think the conversation. Ask for their help in what is troubling you or ask for them to help you be more positive. Just having some one else to talk to can help (even if you can’t see them). You can talk to a trustworthy friend but you run the risk of that becoming a pity party or one-up-manship competition on who has the worst life. This is not the kind of thing you want to dwell on and your spirit guides will not join in your pity.

5. Be open to solutions. As soon as you start letting go of the worry and replacing it with gratitude and hope for a better future, solutions will start to come to you. You may still be in a slightly negative bent and may be tempted to automatically negate any solution that pops up but try to realize what you are doing when that happens. Pay attention to the solution and give it a legitimate look. A true solution may seem weird but as you think about it, doors will start to open to allow it to happen.

There is a way to a better, worry-free life. You can do it!

Suggested reading material:
The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles down load for free from www.thesecret.tv
The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale (also in audio)
Moments of Grace by Neale Donald Walsch
Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen

Your Blood Type Affects Your Life

By Ann on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 | No Comments

We all want to be healthy, or at least feel healthy. But why can two people do the same exercises, eat the same foods, have similar lifestyles and one be healthy and the other not? Some would say it is their genes and that has something to do with it but there is another major contributor; the persons blood type. In Dr. Peter J D’Adamo’s book Eat Right 4 Your Type: The Individualized Diet Solution to Staying Healthy, Living Longer & Achieving Your Ideal Weight,he explains how your blood type determines which foods and even which exercises are best suited for you.

Have you heard all the success so many people have with the low carbohydrate, high protein diet, but when you try the diet you don’t lose much weight? That is because a low-carb, high-protein diet is the optimal diet for Type O blood (which is the most common blood type) and if you happen to have Type A blood that high protein diet will kill you. Type A does great with a vegetarian diet.

According to Dr. D’Adamo, Type O is the oldest blood type. It is the blood type of the hunter-gatherer and what did they eat and thrive on? Meat, poultry and fish along with nuts, berries and any wild edible plants they could find. The hunter-gatherer did not have dairy products or much in the way of grains.

Type A evolved out of Type O. These ancestors were less warlike and more settled than their Type O predecessors. Theses are the first farmers so Type A’s do well with a vegetarian diet. If you are a Type A, sticking to a diet high in vegetables, soy and pineapple but low- or no-meat, dairy, wheat and beans will cause the weight to slide off. If you grow it in your home garden, you can most likely eat it whereas a Type O could only eat the items that would naturally grow wild.

The next blood type to develop was Type B. These were the nomads and thrive on a more balanced diet. Type B is a balancing of the A and O types. Corn, buckwheat, lentils, peanuts and sesame seeds will cause a Type B to gain weight. Gee, I wish I was Type B it is a lot easier to avoid those items than all the grains a type O can’t eat. If you are a Type B and have trouble with your blood sugar levels – USE THIS DIET!

The last blood type is Type AB. This type has been around for less than a thousand years! It is the rarest of the blood types with only about 2 to 5 percent of the population having it. This is a complicated blood type. Type AB needs to avoid the foods that are bad for both Type A and Type B with a few exceptions such as tomatoes.

The book has a section for each blood type; explaining the best diet, with suggested meal plans and recipes. I have tried a number of the recipes and they have been excellent! Each blood type has a listing of foods that are categorized into meats, seafood, dairy, oils, etc. and then the foods in each category are divided into highly beneficial, neutral and “avoids”.

Being a Type O, I have found that when I stick with my high protein, low carb diet, it is easier to keep the weight off — and I feel better.

Manifesting Weight Reduction

By Ann on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 | No Comments

I am a member of a group called “Mindful Happiness”. We meet in Morgan’s Point Resort City every Wednesday evening. It is a great group. We talk about the Law of Attraction, Manifesting, Spirituality, all types of interesting topics. Last week we decided to try group manifesting over the next six months and the topic chosen was weight reduction. (I purposefully did not use the term weight loss because when you use the term loss your mind goes into panic that it lost something and starts looking for it and before long you weigh more than you started with.)

At our meeting tomorrow we will look at different techniques to help with this manifestation. Maybe I will invite everyone to come to my house just down the street. I have a mirror in my bathroom that makes you look thinner. I love that mirror and will miss it when we redo the bathroom (I am manifesting that right now). Some people just can’t see themselves thinner and this mirror can help them visualize. One of the keys to manifesting is to visualize exactly what you want.
We will also discuss what prevents us from believing we can weigh less and ways to overcome that limiting belief system.

We do have one person in the group that seems to manifest easily. I can hardly believe all that he has manifesting in the last two years! He will probably come in the following week 50 pounds lighter.

If you live in the Temple, Belton, Killeen area check us out on Yahoo groups and come to a meeting. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Mindful-Happiness/

Manifesting Requires Faith

By Ann on Monday, July 12th, 2010 | No Comments

Manifesting and the Law of Attraction have become big topics lately. You know how you start thinking about something and then more information about it starts coming your way. This is along the lines of buying a new white Honda Civic and all of a sudden every other car you see is a white Honda Civic. I guess that is the Law of Attraction at work.

I have been bombarded with info from various areas about manifesting. One piece of information was about a woman who won almost every contest she ever entered. The one thing that this woman and all the other people I have read about have in common is Faith, the unshakable belief that something specific was going to happen. I remember having that feeling a few times when I saw a door prize and I knew that it was mine, and it was. This was a feeling as if my heart leaped out and grabbed it.

This reminds me of a woman in the town where I grew up, she was mentally retarded and lived with her mother. But this woman would find out about a contest and enter it. Having the child-like mind she had, she believed that she would receive the prize, and she often did. She and her mother had been around the world on free trips that the daughter had won! Maybe this is what Jesus meant when he said that “anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:13).

We are capable of having the kingdom of God right here and right now if we have faith. This takes this whole business of having faith and believing to a new level and since my fear left three months ago, I have been concentrating on the business of faith and I have to tell you, things are changing! It is very interesting.

The Key to Success in Life

By Ann on Sunday, July 11th, 2010 | No Comments

In keeping with the Biblical theme I have going right now, I wanted to introduce Emmett Fox to my readers. Emmett Fox’s life spanned 1886 to 1951. He wrote a number of books on the stories of the Bible, searching for the deeper meaning behind the stories. Most of the Biblical passages are treated as allegory.

Emmett Fox was a scientist, philosopher and spiritual teacher who lectured widely in the US and Great Britain and promoted tapping into the infinite power that surrounds us.

I have a number of his books on my bookshelf. The one I will focus on today is “The Sermon on the Mount: The Key to Success in Life.
” This is one of those books to own because each time you reread it you will gain further insights into life and yourself. To give you an Idea of his writing here is a quote from the book

“If, when someone is behaving badly, instead of thinking of the trouble, you will immediately switch your attention off from the human to the Divine, and concentrate upon God, or upon the Real Spiritual Self of the person in question, you will find – if you really do this—that his conduct will immediately change. This is the secret of handling difficult people, and Jesus understood it thoroughly. If people are troublesome, you have only to change your thoughts about them, and then they will change too, because your own concept is what you see. This is the true revenge.”

This particular book was first written in 1934. I have found a number of books written from 1910 through the 1950’s that promote ideas that are considered new in our times; specifically the Law of Attraction and Manifesting, both of which actually have deep spiritual roots. Although not called by such names, all these older books contain such ideas, this book is no exception.

The Spirit Creates Our Lives

By Ann on Saturday, July 10th, 2010 | No Comments

I feel I need constant reassurance that God is there and cares about what is going on down here on the material plane. Sometimes I think God is only concerned with the Spiritual.

But no, the spiritual and the material are both tied together. The spiritual is important because it continues after the material is gone, after the physical is gone, after the relationships are gone. All these; physical (health), relationships, and material (wealth), are reflections of the spiritual or the ongoing soul.

Are they different aspects of the soul?

It is like a bud that cannot contain itself any longer and it burst out into a flower; that is what the spirit is doing. It bursts out into something you can sense better, something physical be it a relationship, wealth or health. Sometimes the spirit is troubled or not on the right path. I hate using the word ‘right’ as there is no true wrong or right path, it is more of not being true to whom you are (a child of God) and things we don’t like crop up in our lives. This is a form of manifesting.

The spirit is an energetic force, a vibration. This force creates feelings and emotions. These feelings can have a direct impact on our health. Many illnesses have been linked to negative emotions.

Our relationships are definitely linked to our emotions. Try to have a close relationship without any emotions! It won’t happen. You may have positive or negative emotions but you will have emotions.

For the physical, the new rage is the law of attraction and that involves feelings. You attract more of what you are feeling into your life. If you are feeling hopeful and optimistic more comes to you to give you hope and optimism. If you are feeling worried and scared more comes to you to emphasize those feeling.

We are constantly evolving personally and as a species. It can’t be helped. We are all generating things on this earth, that is why nothing ever stays the same but all is constantly changing.

Help Some One and Help Your Self

By Ann on Friday, July 9th, 2010 | No Comments

Our church youth group went on a mission trip recently and I was intrigued about one of the stories that they came back with. The group that our pastor was in was to do roofing. Now remember most of the participants are Jr. High and High School age kids with two adults per work site. Our pastor admits to not possessing carpentry skills and was rather lost about how to shingle a roof let alone teach a bunch of kid how. There was a person who came to the sites for basic instruction but he had a lot of sites to cover so each team was basically on their own.

Luckily (…but there is no luck or coincidences) next door lived a professional roofer who had been out of work for almost two years. With the economy, no one was building. When he saw what was going on, he came over to help out (much to our pastor’s relief). This man had seen that his neighbor needed a new roof but he did not have the money to buy shingles for this person. The neighbor was glad for the opportunity to help, putting his skills to work.
The team had all week to work and several days into the roofing job, the neighbor had a call which contained a job offer that would start the next week! No job for 2 years then he steps outside of himself and it comes to him.

We are often confronted with such idiosyncrasies. We worry and worry about something and that holds it back. Law of Attraction again, we worry so it brings more worry to us. Then we start to do something constructive and it feels good and things start to turn around to provide more of what feels good.

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