Are You a Money Magnet?

Are you a money magnet? Does money flow into your life easily, effortlessly and consistently? Or, does it seem like the polarity might be reversed on your money magnet so that it’s actually pushing money away?

Here’s an interesting visual exercise from my Art of Abundance workshop that can help you to check the polarity of your own money magnet. Take a look at the following images, and for each one fill in the blanks of the following sentence:

This image makes me think of __________________ and it makes me feel __________________.

 

Don’t over-think your answers, and answer honestly. Just go with your gut response to each image.

Now, look over your answers and see whether your emotional responses were primarily positive, primarily negative or about even. Which image feels most like your current relationship with money? Was your emotional response to that image positive or negative?

If most of your emotional responses are negative (lack, limits, constriction, fear, worry, anxiety, anger, hopelessness, sadness) then your money magnet may be repelling rather than attracting money into your life. If most of your emotional responses were positive (optimism, expansiveness, hope, happiness, love, humor, joy) then your money magnet is set to draw money into your life.

Why would that be true? Because you are seeing these images through your own money perception filter. The images themselves are neutral – it’s your own perception that makes them positive or negative. And the Law of Attraction tells us that our emotional state is the biggest attraction factor: positive emotions attract more positive results, negative emotions attract more negative results.

So, what can you do if your money magnet is set to repel? You can work at reframing your response to each image, especially to the one that feels most like your current money situation. Is it possible to see the image in another way? In a more positive light?

Here are a few reframes that came from my Art of Abundance students recently:

The money with the belt around it reminded one woman about her enormous student loan debt and about feeling very determined to pay it all off, tightening the money belt as much as necessary to do so. It made her feel determined, but also tense. When I asked her if she could see the image in a different, more positive light, she said the image was actually “kind of sexy” – that belt gave the dollars a real hour-glass shape. I suggested that she approach her bill paying and financial decision-making by thinking about how sexy it was to be in control of her money and how cutting back here and there financially was a bit like dieting to create a healthy, sexy  financial body.

For another woman, the man and woman tugging on the dollar sign reminded her of stronger, more powerful people taking money away from the more needy and deserving. It made her feel frustrated in her charity fund-raising work. I suggested that the man and woman could be seen as dancing with money or laughing over money rather than fighting over it. If she brought the idea of dancing and laughing into her fund-raising efforts, maybe it would stop feeling like such a struggle.

Granted, if your habitual money responses are primarily negative, shifting your money magnet into attraction mode may not happen over night. But by consciously working at reframing negative responses to money, you can turn the tide and learn to become a powerful money magnet.

Visioning: Cutting and Pasting Your Future

Staying Grounded by ArtfulAlchemist on Polyvore.com

I recently read this great article about vision boards by the wonderful writer and life coach Martha Beck. I love her humorous writing style and I think she’s nailed some things about how the process works (or doesn’t!).

If you are not a long-term student of the Law of Attraction, you may have first heard the term “vision board” in the movie The Secret. It refers to the process of cutting out pictures of things you want to bring into your life and gluing them down in a notebook or on a large sheet of paper. The idea is that by focusing visually on the things you desire, you will (almost magically) draw them into your life.

Having been trained and certified to facilitate a similar but much more powerful and effective process called Visioning® (created and trademarked by Dr. Lucia Capacchione), I was struck by a number of Beck’s reflections.

• “This whole process [of vision boarding] makes me roll my eyes – as I was trained to do over the course of my very rationalist education – but damn if it doesn’t work.”

LOL! I can so relate to this!! Before I learned the Visioning® process, I had spent over 15 years as a computer programmer/analyst. Talk about rational, logical, linear training! My habitual left-brain view of things had to question how gluing some pictures onto paper could possibly bring those things into my life. But, as Beck says, “damn if it doesn’t work! “

Not only does it work to attract more good into your life, the very process of Visioning® (practiced over time) begins to shift the rigid structure of logical, linear, ego-based, left-brain thinking and awaken the intuitive, creative, heart-based, right-brain modes of thinking that may have been slumbering or atrophied because of a cultural bias for left-brain skills. Visioning® sparks whole-brain thinking, and whole-brain thinking is optimal for problem solving and creating the life you want to be living.

• “To really work, a vision board has to come not from your culture but from your primordial, nonsocial self – the genetically unique animal/angel that contains your innate preferences.”

I agree with this 100%, but I would word it a little differently – AND I think this is one of the major differences between vision boards and Visioning®.

Visioning® works far better than the traditional vision board because the images and phrases that end up in your collage are selected by your heart instead of your head. Rather than already having a picture in mind and then going in search of it, you allow images to select you as you randomly sift through magazines. If you do this correctly, you will often clip images with no idea why you are selecting them. You will just follow your heart as it draws you to a particular image or phrase. Beck hits the nail on the head when she says, “The only responses involved should resemble these:
Ooooh!
Aaaahhhhh.
Whoa!
!!!!
????“

Your final collage may look nothing like what you might have expected it to – because it has been created from your true heart’s desire instead of the programmed messages in your ego-based left brain. That’s exactly the result you want.

When you follow the Visioning® process up with structured journaling, you are seeding the desires of your heart (as reflected in your selected imagery) back into your rational left brain (because language and words are left-brain functions). That’s when the magic starts to happen because you are beginning to replace entrenched left-brain habits and patterns (which have created the life you are currently living) with new, juicy, heartfelt ideas (that can help you to create the life of your dreams).

• “This is exactly what you should do once you’ve created a vision board. Stop thinking about it. Lose it. Recycle it. The biggest mistake [you can] make is continuing to push something [you’ve] already set in motion.”

Now here I have to disagree. Sort of.

It’s true, I have seen manifestations come long after putting a Visioning® collage away and forgetting about it. But I have also seen deep insights and fabulous manifestations happen by keeping a Visioning® collage where it can be reflected upon regularly for weeks – even months – on end.

At the very least, you should keep your Visioning® collage where you can see it and work with it long enough to journal about or dialogue with at least a handful of the most powerful images. This is how you move your heart’s desire into full consciousness and clarity. Without this step, it is too easy for the dreams that emerged to be overridden by firmly entrenched habits and the status quo.

It is true that you need to let go of your attachment to a particular outcome and especially release the need to control the “hows” of manifesting your heart’s desire. Here is where you have to trust in and rely upon your partnership with the larger powers of Spirit. The Universe (aka God) knows far better ways of manifesting your dreams than you do. So don’t think you have to go it alone.

That said, manifesting your dream life will take some work on your part. You have to do more than just stare at your Visioning® collage and wait for your dream to land in your lap. Keep your eyes, ears and heart open to synchronicities and connections that can help you move toward your dream. Take action when action is called for. Just make sure that action is heart-driven and divinely inspired rather than completely left-brain, ego-based or habitual.

• “This is the zone of reality creation: regularly picturing delights that don’t yet exist, emotionally detaching from them, and jumping into action when it’s time to help the miracles occur.”

Amen, Sister Beck! I could not agree with you more!

Feel free to contact me if you’d like more information about the process of Visioning® or you’d like to experience a facilitated Visioning® session. You might also want to check out Dr. Capacchione’s book, Visioning: Ten Steps to Designing the Life of Your Dreams or visit www.VisioningCoach.org.

The Art of Attraction

Art can provide a powerful and visceral experience of the dynamics at play in the Law of Attraction. Last week, in my Law of Attraction Study Group, we explored how our focus shifts what we attract. The Law of Attraction is always at work – a quick look at our thoughts can show us what we’re really attracting.

I had the group do a quick vision board collage of just a few things they’d like more of in their lives. Here is what mine looks like:



Now, if I’m truly focusing my INTEREST, ATTENTION and EXPECTATION on those desires for easy, smart money, chill-out weekends, travel and a buff “very real power” body, then why have they not manifested for me up until now?

Taking just one of my desires as an example: If I am honest with myself, it is probably because I’m a lot more INTERESTED in paying ATTENTION to the chocolate cake on the counter than to running several miles a day. And my EXPECTATION is that losing weight and getting in shape will be difficult, time-consuming and boring.

The main thing that gets in the way of manifesting whatever we desire is our habit of tacking “buts” onto the end of every wish. I’d love to have easy, smart money BUT making money is hard. I desire relaxing weekends BUT if I want money, I’ll have to trade all my free time for it. I would love to travel more BUT in this economy, there’s just no way I can swing it. I’d love to run and bike more BUT I just don’t have time for exercise. I’d love to have a powerful lean body BUT I don’t believe my body could ever look like that.

Guess what we’re doing with all those “buts?”



When you look at it graphically, it’s easy to see that we are putting up bars and building a prison between ourselves and our desires.

Mary Manin Morrissey tells a wonderful story about Nelson Mandela that illustrates how we can shift our perspective about all those “buts.” She says that when Mandela was first arrested he despaired. He thought, “My dream of the end of apartheid can never happen now.” That thought played over and over in his head. “It’ll never happen now. It’ll never happen now.” One day, a new thought came into his mind: “Maybe it could still happen.” It was just a glimmer, not at all a certainty. Yet he grabbed on to that thought like a drowning man grabs a life preserver. “Maybe it could still happen.” He trained his mind to focus on that thought and after a little more time he thought with wonder, “Maybe this is what it looks like while it’s happening!” From that moment on, he had a new zest for doing whatever he could, even though he was still imprisoned. He began a letter writing campaign and soon gained the attention and support of the U.S. Eventually, he did realize his dream. So, no bars are too strong if the mind is stronger!

If you have built a prison of “buts” around your dreams and desires, I challenge you to shift your perspective. How might it be that “this is what it looks like while it’s happening?” Does it seem like a sluggish economy is stopping you from being successful? Maybe a sluggish economy is exactly what your road to success looks like. How can you turn it to your advantage? Do you want to travel but feel like there’s no money or time for it? Maybe that longing for travel is exactly what could bring you more money and time through a travel-related career.

Take all those buts and turn them around. Turn them into assets rather than liabilities. Look at them from a different perspective. Or tear them down and get rid of them.

We ended our program last week by removing those bars from our vision boards and burning them. Whatever it takes.