The Bliss Book

by Maggie Shayne

  Our Higher Selves, by the way, are always on the frequencies of joy and ease, well-being and bliss. Tune to those things, and we tune to Divine energy.

  Some of the happiest people alive today had bad first marriages, painful breakups, and almost all of us made choices our parents or other people in our lives probably thought were horrible mistakes.

  Every single decision, every choice, every action, causes an infinite number of reactions which then spawn more decisions and choices, which then lead to more reactions. It’s infinite. People say it’s like a pebble tossed into a pond, causing ripples in every direction, but that analogy is too small. I’d rather use the analogy of everything we think and do acting like the beat of a butterfly’s wing, which causes the tiniest breeze, which expands and grows, and can later arrive in some distant land as a hurricane or cyclone, a twister or haboob.

  As an individual, I can’t even know all the myriad and infinite repercussions each of my own actions and choices might have. How, then, can I possibly know what repercussions another’s actions might have?

  Would you approve if your son or daughter decided to drop out of college? Both Oprah Winfrey and Steve Jobs dropped out and soared to mega success. What if your child got into Harvard, and then decided to quit? Bill Gates did that and I doubt he has a single regret.

  We are not here to make choices or decisions for others, and no matter how experienced we think we are in whatever subject they’re deciding, we are not remotely qualified to tell them what to do. Our choices for them will never be as accurate as their own choices for themselves, because they have their own Higher Power, who knows much better than we do what’s best for them, and the best path to get them there.

  And so, since any time we give anyone advice about anything, we are a million times more likely to be wrong than right, and because we now know they have a Source of infinite wisdom they can tap into at will, we can relax and let go.

  When our worry about others keeps us awake and in a state of stress, we are as much as saying, “You have to change your behavior so that I will feel better.”

  And you know what? It wouldn’t work, even if they did, because we’d move on to worrying about some other behavior we don’t like, or some other person whose choices we don’t agree with.

  We must find our well-being inside our own lives, our own decisions, our own connection. No one else’s.

  And that includes our kids. We don’t need to show them videos of bloody multi-car pile ups in order to make them drive safely. In fact, exposing them to that implants fear into their minds in relationship to driving, and being in a state of fear while driving will attract to them things that match that vibration. Like accidents. There’s nothing we can do that will ensure our kid has a wreck more than letting them attend one of those mock accidents at school. Keep them home that day.

  There are better ways to teach safe driving. Teaching by example is the best of these.

  We can teach kids stop, drop and roll, without showing them images of children on fire. We can instill in them a confident and firm sense of ownership over their own bodies, without making them read case studies of pedophiles. There’s a big difference between empowering a child and terrifying one.

  We don’t need to instill fear in our kids. We only need to instill the knowledge that they have a Source who has all the information, and give them the room to trust that Source and their gut feelings and instincts, which are usually coming from it. Teach by example that all is well, that things are always working out for them, that the world is a good place, and that their upbeat and positive energy will keep them surrounded by goodness. If they see or experience anything not in keeping with that, they will know to walk away from it and to let you now.

  Of course we want to keep our kids safe, teach them our version of right and wrong. We want them to grow up to be kind, compassionate, caring humans. But we’re going to accomplish all those things more effectively by our own living example, than we ever will by talking, much less by lying awake worrying.

  Lying awake worrying ourselves sick about our kids can only teach them to lie awake worrying. We don’t want that outcome.

  Our main job when it comes to the other people in our lives is to love them unconditionally, and to see in them their full potential, regardless of what they’re living in the moment. See them as you know they can be.

  Worry About Money

  Probably the number one worry on most of our minds is worry about money. This worry has nothing to do with how much money we have. That’s the biggest revelation I’ve had. I’ve been very very poor. No indoor toilet poor. No electricity or phone poor. And I’ve also been moderately wealthy. So I can say from experience that no matter how much more income I bring in, there’s an equivalent uptick in what goes out. The decimal point moves, but nothing else changes. It can’t change, no matter what the numbers are, until and unless I can change my attitude about money. That’s all of it, right there. It’s attitude, not the bank balance.

  Worrying about not having enough money is the best way to keep ourselves perpetually broke. Our mind is tuned in to the channel playing the “lack” song and it’s set to Repeat. “I don’t have enough. There’s not enough. I’m broke. I’m poor. I need more. I don’t have enough. There’s not enough. I’m broke. I’m poor. I need more. I don’t have enough…” Ad infinitum.

  So that’s the channel we’re tuned in to. That’s the station we’re hearing, the one playing “Not Enough Money.” As long as we’re attuned to that frequency, that’s the only kind of song we can hear, because that’s all they play on this channel. It’s the only life we can live, because we create it over again every time we repeat the thought.

  We are powerful, limitless creators. Everything we believe comes true. So belief in not enough of anything, creates even more instances of not enough in our lives.

  Retrain the Mind to Notice Abundance Instead of Lack

  Replacement is the only way to get rid of anything. You can’t banish lack, or hex away poverty, no matter how many years you’ve studied natural magic. You can’t pray anything away even if you’re the Pope. Attention to a thing holds it to you and creates more of it. When we’re banishing and hexing and praying and pleading to be rid of something, we are 100% focused on that thing, and therefore, we’re making it bigger, stronger, and more stuck like glue to us.

  Abraham [5] says, shouting "Yes, I want more of you!” at something is exactly the same as shouting “No, I don’t want you at all!” at something. Both examples cause more of that thing in our experience. It’s not the words. It’s not even the Intention. It’s the attention. It’s the focus. It’s us looking at it, thinking about it, validating our belief in it by paying attention to it, so then more of it crops up around us in more places, and we say, “See? I told you it was real!” Most of us do not even realize we’re the ones keeping it there.

  To end a habit we don’t want, we must replace it with a better habit that we do want. Delete a file and it still exists, even if you empty the trash. Overwrite the file, and it’s changed forever. What do we replace the unwanted habit with? The unwanted thing’s opposite will do best, in most cases. So, if we want to get rid of our consciousness of not enough, the only way to do so is to overwrite it with a consciousness of plenty.

  We can’t lie about it, either. We can’t sit here saying, “I’m a billionaire. I’m a billionaire. I’m a billionaire,” and expect a billion dollars to rain down from the heavens into our laps. That can’t happen because we don’t really believe we’re billionaires. We probably don’t even believe it’s possible we’ll ever be billionaires. And we certainly don’t believe money can rain down from the sky.

  But we can start noticing all we do have, rather than noticing all we lack. Instead of complaining about our rusted-out junker, we can bask in love for our functional vehicle that gets us where we need to go. Same car. Different attitude. Instead of griping about our ugly house, we can find things about our homes to love.
Same building. Different mindset. We can bask in having a safe haven, a roof and walls and a floor, a bed, heat and light. Instead of counting up the things we can’t afford, look at all the things we can afford, the ones we have afforded up to now. Same income. Different perspective on it.

  Instead of complaining about how little our job pays, we can start blessing every single dollar we earn from it. Same job. Totally different experience of it.

  Be a Detective

  We must start looking for signs that our financial situation is already improving. We can do a little treasure hunt with the goal and intention of finding hidden abundance that’s already right here in our lives and just hasn’t been noticed yet.

  When I started looking for signs of abundance in my life during a tight time not all that long ago, I found all sorts of charges on my phone and internet accounts that were either in error, or services I’d never asked for or no longer wanted. I zapped those. Voila! That’s found money. Money I didn’t know I had.

  I found subscriptions to services I’d signed up for years ago and didn’t even know I was still paying for. I annihilated those. Bam! More free money.

  Those things made me feel better about finances. Not a lot, but a little bit. And so that better feeling, and early success finding small bits of money here and there, boosted my confidence and that led to other, bigger things. Because once the snowball starts rolling down the hill, that’s what happens. I was changing my station by shifting my focus from “I can’t find any extra money” to “I’m on a treasure hunt, and I’m already having early success!”

  I found a heavy silver tray in the attic worth $400. I’d glimpsed it in passing, but never really saw it, probably because I’d been thinking, “Look at all this junk in this attic,” instead of thinking, “Abundance rains down if I just expect it to.”

  I received money that was owed me that I’d forgotten all about. My snowball was getting bigger.

  I had a publisher discover an error in their royalty calculations that resulted in a check big enough to cover the down payment and closing costs on my house. I’d had no idea how I would be able to pay those costs at the time. And out of the blue, it just arrived at a time when I was expecting no payments at all.

  Then, what I thought I owed in income taxes turned out to be half that amount. I kept trying to correct the IRS agent on the phone, I was so certain.

  Look, the truth is there is a lot more abundance than lack in our lives, just like there is a lot more to praise than there is to complain about. But complaining is much more fun. We get into conversations with our friends where it can seem as if we’re trying to out-do each other with our awful experiences.

  “I broke my toe!”

  “You think that’s bad? I broke my leg!”

  “Yeah, but I’m a dancer!”

  “So what? I’m a runner!”

  You’ve had conversations like this. You know you have. We all have. When someone tells us something awful that happened to them, the knee-jerk reaction is to sympathize by sharing a similar experience. Or a worse one. Try to practice turning these conversations positive, instead.

  “I broke my toe.”

  “I’m so sorry about that. Thank goodness it wasn’t worse. I’ve heard toes heal fast.”

  “But I’m a dancer!”

  “A little time off won’t change that, though. Let’s think up fun things to do while you’re healing.”

  See how that works? No, it’s not going to work every time. Sometimes people want to wallow and that’s okay. Just don’t dive in and wallow with them.

  Now let’s apply this to our own, internal dialogue about money.

  Little Self: “I just got all the bills paid, and had just enough, and now here’s another big one that I didn’t expect! I don’t have the funds to pay it!”

  Higher Self: “If the bill came in, the money to pay it will come in, too.”

  LS: “What if it doesn’t?”

  HS: “Why do you think that extra bill came?”

  LS: “I don’t know. To make me miserable?”

  HS: “To increase your income.”

  LS: “What, now?”

  HS: “Contrast, aka bad stuff, comes along to highlight how much better life would be without it. It nudges us to solve it, and when we do, we’re in a higher place than we were before. New bills come to create new income. It’s a matter of flow. When the outflow increases, the inflow must increase to match it. All you have to do is trust and let go.”

  Focusing on what we have instead of what we think we lack might feel forced at first, but that will change with practice. What we look for, we will always find. I know this sounds like far too easy an answer, but this is how reality is created. The entire physical world is made by its inhabitants being exposed to something unwanted, thinking about what would be better, and shifting focus to that better thing. It’s how we went from caves to condos, from horses to cars, from wagon trains to airplanes. It’s how we eradicated countless diseases.

  Today most of us carry the entire world of knowledge on a smart phone in our pocket, which has more computing power than it took to guide the early Apollo missions. Those computers took up a whole room, and everyone working on them thought, “Gee, it would be great if we could make this stuff smaller.”

  Poof! Granted.

  Okay, maybe not quite poof! But you’d better believe the very attention of those scientists to how much better computers would be if they were smaller, opened their minds to the inspiration of Source. As soon as they stopped complaining about big, slow, noisy machines, and started looking at all the good those machines did, and then started imagining ways to shrink the technology instead, they found them.

  You always find what you’re looking for.

  We experience the unwanted in order to identify what’s preferred. When we shift our focus to that preferred thing, we find it. That, repeating over and over from every new level, is evolution in a nutshell. If you don’t believe me, try it for yourself. Put these practices to the test by doing them. Give yourself six months or a year. Give yourself a week to start with, and see if you notice any improvement.

  Looking for reasons to feel better off than we used to feel will create reasons to feel better off than we used to feel. Looking for the abundance we already have, opens paths for more to flow in, which results in us being wealthier than we used to be. Celebrating those new little gems of abundance we discover once we start looking for them will make them multiply. Soon we’ll not only be happier with what we have…but as a side effect, we’ll have more.

  You don’t make more money and then feel wealthier.

  You feel wealthier and then make more money.

  One more insight here. The abundance, the money, the increased wealth isn’t the goal. It never was. Think about why you wanted more abundance. Yes, to pay the bills, but why? To ease the worry. To end the worry. To feel better.

  Feel better first. Learn how to feel better first, and the money will become irrelevant. It’ll come anyway, but the longer you spend practicing, the more you’ll realize that despite all the other goals we think we have, there’s only one true goal, and that’s feeling good. Everything else we think we want is because we’ll feel good once we have it.

  If we can find ways to feel good now, we’ll have everything.

  Don’t Worry About How

  One of the ways we block the inflow of anything we want is by trying to puzzle out how we can possibly get it, where it can possibly come from. Here’s the thing; if we were capable of imagining where it could possibly come from, we’d probably already have it. Belief is the key. If we believed in it, it would already exist in our lives.

  So stop trying to second guess the Universe. We don’t have to know how our radio works to enjoy the music. We just turn it on, tune our dial, and leave the rest to the professionals.

  Every one of us will have far more success if we can just get happy right where we are. Find the abundance we already have. Bask in the blessings
pouring down on us like a rainstorm. Most of the leaps I’ve made have come from unexpected places. My biggest financial growth happened after losing a job. My first appearance on the New York Times Bestseller’s List happened with a book I wasn’t even hoping would hit it, because it was another in a long-running series and none of the previous titles had landed on the list.

  Just be content where you are and eager for more.

  A Bit About Paying Down Debt

  I once had a $34,000 balance on a credit card at 29.9% interest. My minimum monthly payments were over $1000. It was horrendous, and I didn’t see any way out. But I was already studying all this vibration stuff, so I was (eventually) able to shift my focus. It took a lot of practice, a lot of learning, a lot of peeling away the layers of my understanding before it really clicked. I couldn’t not notice the debt. It was on my mind constantly. So I had to start focusing on things I could do right then to ease the worry, while focusing on abundance that I already had.

  That wasn’t my knee-jerk reaction. My knee-jerk reaction was panic. I called the credit card company in that state, and asked for a lower rate. They said no, and I broke into tears and all but begged. They repeated their no.

  After I’d calmed down, I realized I never should have made the call in the state I was in. I should have set about getting myself aligned first. I had to think about my Higher Self’s opinion on the whole thing. And my Higher Self, I knew, could clearly see a million routes for that debt to go away. And I knew She could also see that 999,999 of them were blocked by my fear, panic and doubt. I needed to release those things.

  It’s way easier said than done, we all know that. But it’s not impossible. I did things I loved. I meditated every day. I basked in sunshine and played with grandchildren and ate chocolate, and paid a little more than the minimum each month, and congratulated myself on having enough to pay most of my bills, and reminded myself what people in other countries earn per year.