The Bliss Book

by Maggie Shayne

  Mary gets a cold, takes something to relieve the symptoms, and forgets about it. If the symptoms return, she takes another dose. If she can’t find relief, she takes a nap to sleep it off. If it’s still bad when she wakes, she’ll grant herself a day of pampering, and watch her favorite movies or read her favorite books to get her mind off her troubles. Aside from her partner, she doesn’t mention it to anyone, or if it comes up, she brushes it off with, “Case of the sniffles. Taking the day off. Talk to you tomorrow.” She does tell her partner, because it’s kind of nice when he waits on her a little bit.

  Generally speaking, and all other things being equal, Mary is going to be a much healthier person than Maxine. Her “bug” will pass quickly, but Maxine’s will linger.

  I need to insert a disclaimer here that this is an example of how we can influence our health by adjusting our state of mind. Sickness and health are complex issues, and there are myriad reasons we get sick. It’s always awful, and I wish it would never happen to anyone. I would never suggest patients caused their own illness. I’m saying, no matter the condition, its source or its cause, focus on it will make it worse. Focusing on things that feel good instead will make it better. Cure it? Maybe, if that’s for the overall good of the soul and the Whole. But at the very least, we get to feel good anyway. We get to feel good now.

  And when I say focus on something good, I’m not sure that’s the best word. I mean, find the very best thing you can in every moment of every day and wrap yourself up in it.

  Basking in your beautiful life is the secret art of living well.

  We can substitute any other topic for illness in the above example, and the same results will apply. Gravity works on everyone the same way. So does vibration. Whether the virus in this story is a debt, a car accident, a misbehaving teenager, colicky baby or inattentive spouse, the result is going to be the same. Attention to the problem makes it grow. Basking in the present while imagining the solution, will bring that around instead.

  Knowing this and beginning to learn how to adjust our own internal dial can give us the power to allow health, joy, love, and abundance into our lives, as easily as changing the station on the radio.

  Having learned all of this myself, having practiced it for two decades with varying degrees of consistency, and having learned from each and every experiment and experience how to better tune my dial, I have become adept at it. And I am compelled to share what I’ve learned with anyone who is looking for just this kind of information.

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  Assignment 1

  Your Own Bliss Book

  * * *

  Start a journal. You’re going to use it for the other assignments in this book. Put some thought into it. Choose something you can bask in. Something that delights you. And think about where you’re going to do your journaling, too.

  I do a lot of fingers-on-the-keyboard writing, but sometimes, I feel more in tune when I write by hand. A special pen, slender and light to fit my hand, with a fine point, but not so fine it cuts the paper. A beautiful blank book, with pale ghostlike images on heavy pages and art on the cover that takes my breath away. A cup of tea. A soft shawl around my shoulders. A seat by the window where I can see the bird feeders. Music playing softly in the background. These things make my journaling time special, and different from my other writing time.

  So give this some thought, and get yourself a journal, a pen, a writing spot, and begin your practice today.

  Open your journal and jot down what you hope to get from this book and these practices. And it’s okay if you include better stuff in that. I, myself have a lake house in my future. There is nothing un-spiritual about improving our lives. We live in paradise. More accurate to say, we’re a part of paradise. Our mother, the Earth. We need to start acting like it. Part of this journey we’re on—a big part of it—involves coming to understand that abundance is neither inherently sinful, nor necessary for happiness.

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  Chapter Two

  The Habit of Seeking Beauty

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  The very first step on the path of the rest of our lives begins right now, today. Today we begin to make our lives beautiful, because today is the day we begin seeking beauty.

  Why Beauty?

  You’d think the first step would be something more important, wouldn’t you? Something deep and spiritual. But there is nothing more spiritual than beauty, unless it’s love. And I kind of think they’re different facets of the same jewel. When I look at something that’s so beautiful it takes my breath away and brings a tear to my eye—well, that’s love, isn’t it?

  Beauty is important to our well-being. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be surrounded by it. Flowers use their bright, beautiful colors and delightful fragrances to attract insects and birds, who spread their pollen and fertilize the next generation. This is a sensual rite of reproduction, and it begins with the ancient practice of using beauty to attract a lover. The flower opens her petals, emits her drugging fragrance, and bees cannot resist. They come together with the flower. They drink her nectar and fertilize her with the pollen that clings to their legs and feet.

  Birds use their beautiful and powerful songs to attract their mates. The brightest, most beautiful plumage, the strongest, most musical voice, the most dramatic and creative dance wins the attention of the female, and they mate and the next generation is created.

  Humans do all this, too. Don’t we? We fix our hair and wear makeup, we clean and groom ourselves. We want our teeth white and our skin smooth. We wear clothes and jewelry that make us feel beautiful, and others find us beautiful, too. We’re attracted to others who are beautiful to us, and in many more ways than just physical beauty. The voice that strokes like silk, the eyes that melt the heart, the wit that can always make us laugh, the soul that speaks to our own.

  Beauty is uplifting, and thrilling, and soothing, and healing. Beauty’s vibration resonates way up high, alongside things like joy and bliss and appreciation. Being exposed to beautiful things is good for our health and well-being.

  Here’s a snippet from The Huffington Post:

  Using MRI scans, scientists are now able see the impact pleasurable experiences have on neurophysiology. Findings show that emotions stimulated by beauty, love, laughter and joy influence the part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, also known as the reward center. Studies highlight how neurotransmitters, like dopamine and serotonin, are activated and lead to a positive sense of well-being (similar to the impact that opiates have on the brain.)

  –Huffington Post “Can Beauty Actually Improve Your Health ” 08/11/2015

  Some might think we’re not all lucky enough to live in a place where we’re surrounded by beauty. But they’d be wrong. There’s beauty everywhere, once we remove the veil from our eyes that can make it invisible to us.

  That’s a hard one to swallow, I know—the notion that things are there that we can’t see, and that we need to attune to them in order to see them. I might argue that we don’t doubt a rabbit can hear things we can’t hear, that an eagle can see things we can’t see, that our dogs can smell things we can’t smell. But those are different species, so let me give you a personal example.

  My bff went on an Alaskan cruise, and as she was telling me about it afterward, she talked about one of the excursions where they took a bus ride through Denali, and how one of the people on the bus with her kept pointing out animals along the way. “Look there! A moose!” She’d say, and she’d point, and my friend would look and sure enough, she’d see a moose. My pal told me, “I kept thinking, thank God I’m on the bus with someone who notices those things, you know, like you do. Otherwise I’d have missed them all.”

  I took that as a beautiful compliment. And it’s true, I tend to see every eagle, vulture, red-tail hawk, osprey, coyote, and deer. Every odd shaped cloud and shooting star. Every tree and plant and boulder.

  My friend frequently notices how I tend spot these things because I point them out to her when w
e’re riding together in the car, and usually I’m the one driving. This is terrifying to most passengers, and I imagine that’s why it’s one of my more memorable traits in her mind.

  We don’t see things we’re not tuned in to. I love seeing wildlife, especially raptors, so I’m always watching for them and because I watch for them I see them. Just think about this a little. We can’t find our keys when we think we’ve lost them. Later, when we’re no longer looking for them, we’ll find them in a spot we already checked three times. This is a real phenomenon, the way we can block ourselves from seeing something we don’t believe is there.

  We don’t have to understand how the Law of Gravity works to keep from floating off the planet. And likewise, we don’t have to understand how the Law of Attraction works to experience things that match whatever frequency we’re tuned in to. We just do.

  If I don’t like what I’m seeing on the TV, I can change the station. And I can do the same with my life. The remote control is in my head.

  For now, to begin, and as a way of seeing for ourselves that this isn’t a bunch of hippy-dippy new-age blabber, let’s do a simple experiment.

  Let’s search our surroundings—our home or neighborhood or school or job or life—for something that makes our hearts sing whenever our eyes fall on it. If there is nothing that makes our hearts sing, then we should go find something. Make something. Buy something. Build something. Adopt something. Plant something. Create something.

  This should be something we’re going to see every day. It should be something we live with or work with. It can be anything, something we discover or something we make or something we drag home from a yard sale or off-the-beaten-path junk shop.

  It might be some physical characteristic of the landscape around us that we just hadn’t noticed before. Maybe a rock jutting out of a hillside, or a plant or special tree in the yard. It could be a city skyline, the architecture of a building, or the nighttime sky overhead, when it fills with stars.

  It might be something inside our home, a painting or drawing, a sculpture or figurine, a particular room or seat we love. Maybe there’s a fireplace or a special piece of furniture. It could be a painting or a framed photo, or an antique.

  It might be someone we live with, a friend, parent, sibling, a spouse or lover, a child, a baby, or a beloved pet.

  It can be a visual thing. It can be a scent. It can be a favorite song or other sound, it can be the texture of something beloved, it can be a favorite piece of chocolate, or TV show or movie.

  I have a specific view from my back yard that takes my breath away. I see it every morning and again every afternoon when we walk our dogs. It looks different every time. There are mountains in the distance, layers of them, and the view is different every single day. Sometimes there is mist between the layers of the hills. Every day, I stop in this one particular spot, under the big old maple tree I’ve named The Grandfather, and spend a few seconds just gazing at that view.

  But I can get the same blissful feeling from looking at the photos of my grandkids lining the walls of the house, from re-reading an old Valentine from my husband, from wrapping my arms around Niblet, my intrepid English bulldog, and just hugging her and feeling how she leans in to hug me back, or from listening to Ed Sheeran’s “I See Fire.”

  Find something beautiful that you can experience every day. And then really experience it every day.

  Truly Experience it

  By really experience it every day, I don’t mean I’ll just notice it as I rush past it on my way to whatever pressing thing is next on my to-do list. I don’t turn off the music after the first two lines of my favorite song. I stop what I’m doing, close the laptop, and immerse myself in it. Whatever beautiful things we discover in our lives, are there for us to look at them, hear them, smell them, taste them, touch them. They deserve for us to pause and truly relish them. Every single day. Several times a day is even better.

  Why this is Important

  We are creators. How do we know this? I’m going to use a snip from Dr. Wayne Dyer’s fabulous film The Shift to explain. In the movie, Dr. Wayne takes a slice from a pie, puts it on a plate, hands it to one of his companions and asks, “What is this?”

  “It’s pie,” the lucky recipient replies.

  “And how do you know it’s pie?” asks Wayne.

  “Because it came from a pie.”

  And that’s how we know we’re creators. Everything in all of creation is an extension of Source. Of the Whole. Of the Creator. So how can any part of a creator not also be a creator?

  As creators, we must have beauty in our lives. Experiencing physical beauty and pleasure is one of the great reasons we came here into these physical bodies in this physical world. And before we came, we were, even then, creators. The Source, of which we are a part, created this world we now inhabit. Like painters with a canvas, the Source of which we are a part painted and sculpted this world.

  The Paints and the Clay are Emotions

  The feeling I get when I’m standing in my back yard, staring out at the view of the distant hills and mountains in the autumn of the year is one particular batch of paint. Spirit dips its brush into the can and flings those feelings onto the canvas of creation, and the result is the very hillside of color I’m looking at.

  The feelings came first.

  The physical equivalent of this particular feeling of awestruck wonder and deep appreciation, is every shade of yellow and purple and orange, every shade of red and brown and green, as fluorescent in the sunshine as a mustard stain under a black light.

  The feeling I get when I hold a new puppy was a feeling first. The resulting creation that came from that feeling, is the puppy. Its softness, its wet nose, its impossibly perfect puppy smell, its little grunts and snuffles. That feeling came first. Puppy was what it became when the feelings took on physical form.

  Everything we experience is the physical representation of the feeling we feel when we experience it.

  That’s all the physical world is, I think. The painting of our non-physical Source, and particularly of that part of our Source that is YOU and that is ME.

  Your body is the physical reflection of all your spirit is, just as my body is the outward growth of my spirit.

  My home, my surroundings, my family, all chosen by me, to be the physical embodiments of the emotions I desired to experience in this lifetime.

  You and I are painters who have stepped into our own painting. That’s what physical life is. The writer, stepping into her own story. Walking around in it. Living in it. Experiencing it with every sense. Seeing where, from this new perspective, it might be even better. Seeing where, from this new perspective, there are things we would paint differently.

  While we’re here, we continue creating. We are creators, there is never a moment when we are not creating. It’s what we do. It’s what Spirit is. It’s what life is. Consciousness, creating.

  And so we continue to create. All we see around us is a reflection of all we are. We have painted and sculpted and written it with emotion.

  So when things are hard, or when we’re afraid, we need to find something in this life of ours that is beautiful. Something that makes our hearts sing, and then let it make our hearts sing every single day. Bask in it every day. Love it every day.

  That’s our first experiment.

  Our second is this: We find something else that gives us joy, and add it to our daily basking.

  Our third assignment: Find a third thing.

  Get the pattern?

  When we choose to focus on something that gives us joy, we are changing our channel. We’re adjusting the energy we emit, our aura, to a frequency of beauty. We are literally radiating beauty whenever beauty has our attention, and that vibration then creates the physical reflection of itself.

  We are creating what we emanate. Always. And soon, more things made of beauty start taking form all around us. Things made of love start appearing in our lives. Things made of bliss, of appreciat
ion, of gratitude, of happiness. Things that inspire those emotions in us pop up all around us. And when they do, we summon even more.

  It’s a blissful spiral that gets better and better.

  The Alternative

  I’ve seen, and too often, the same spiral effect with things that match what we commonly think of as lower vibrations. Fear, anger, hatred.

  Every emotion we feel emanates from us like the ring of a bell. It ripples outward in waves that go on infinitely. An emotion I send out frequently enough eventually brings a physical match to it. Hate, anger, and fear become things, events, and people in our lives. They become illnesses. They become poverty. They become addiction. They become misery. They become anxiety. They become betrayals and breakups and losses.

  Everything we do, think, say, believe, focus on, and think about, every day of our lives creates our vibrational frequency. It tunes our dial. It emanates from us in the form of our aura, our electromagnetic field. It paints our world, sculpts our environment, and writes our story.

  Am I saying once we tune our dial, we’ll never experience another loss or setback? Not at all. I’m saying that when we do, we will know that everything is always working out the way it’s supposed to. We’ll trust that this apparent setback will turn out to be the best, shortest, most efficient route to where we want to be.

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  Assignment 2

  Bliss Up Your Space

  * * *

  Find or create something you can see every day that makes your heart sing. Spend time basking in it every day. That means, stop everything and focus only on the beauty of that thing for a few minutes. Do this every day for a week, and write about your experience in your journal. Record what your beautiful thing is. Maybe even take a photo and tape that in there too.