Positive Manifestation Starts with Gratitude

My cousins grew up without indoor plumbing. They weren't poor, they just lived in a farm house that was about a hundred years old or so. Their father was planning to build a new house & put running water in the barn that would continue to be used but not in the house they were going to abandon. Since I moved here at the end of November, I've had a day without heat & the thermostat sometimes takes awhile to obey when I try to turn up the heat in the morning. A few times I've come home to a fairly cold house because the heat wasn't running while I was gone, for whatever reason. I also spent a lot of January with no electricity because of a breaker that was in the process of burning out. I'd have hours without, then hours with, & never knew which it would be. I have a working dryer but it doesn't work here because it's electric with no outlet for anything but gas. My washer broke a few weeks before I moved & I haven't had the money to fix it.

It's all perspective - the "haves" & "have nots." If we concentrate on what we don't have, on the lack, that's what continues. If we're grateful for what we do have, count our blessings, then we've changed the perspective. That slight change, which is actually a major difference, makes the difference between manifesting positive things & not. We DO manifest! We are part of Creator & creation, so we do manifest. What most people don't realize is that we manifest from whatever our attitude is.

Most of us get caught in our own dramas & that's all we see. Last year at this time I was still very mired in the drama of loss. It was 4 months after I put my then husband in jail for stealing my mother's life savings. My reality was all about finding ways to cope. When I went to Groundhog Day events, I was answering questions about it from my friends in the Inner Circle of the Groundhog Club. At that time I was still a bit ashamed, as if I'd had something to do with it. So when the owner of Sam Adams brewery told me he'd heard of me, I thought the worst. Yesterday I was thinking about things that happened during this year's festivities & realized what the man meant. He'd said something about how great Punxsy is & the quality of the festivities put on by the Inner Circle, when he was giving a brief speech at a reception in his honor. So I made it a point of going up to him & telling him I agree with what he said so much, because I'd moved to PA from Maryland because of the town, the Groundhog Day festivities, & Phil himself. That's when he said he'd heard of me. It's not that he heard of my shame (in my mind at the time)  - it's that my story (the moving to PA part) is bragging rights for the town & the Inner Circle. They weren't talking against me, they were using me as a positive example. There was no shame - they're proud to tell people I moved to PA because of them. And this year, they let me know they're pleased to see the positive changes in me in the past year. They see me happy, looking good, refocused. Last year I actually felt shunned for awhile. Now I see that was a reflection of my feelings about me, not reality. We truly color our perceptions of everything when we're stuck in our own dramas.

These days I'm very grateful for heat, electricity, & my new home. I took heat, running water, & electricity for granted until the events in January. Now I don't take any of this for granted. I am grateful when I go to the grocery & pay for what we need. I'm grateful for every little thing provided for me, like the can of coffee brought to me by a friend. That's supply for my wants. I'm grateful for my abundance of friends & family, the abundance of love in my life. I'm grateful for the abundance of cats in my life, in my home. Instead of grumbling to myself when I scoop out their litter boxes, I'm grateful they use them, am grateful for really nice kitty litter. Because my major attitude is gratitude, I'm happy & content with what I have. This isn't true all the time. When I don't take care of myself or the things around me, things start to get out of hand & my attitude slips. Worry & fear slip in & things turn more negative. Then nothing works as well & problems start to get to me & more start happening. That's manifestation of the negative. As soon as I fix that & go back to the positive, it all starts to flow again. It truly is possible to do that even when things aren't as you wish. If you wait for things to start happening the way you want them before being grateful & positive, it's just not going to happen. You have to learn to be truly grateful & a good steward of what you do have before more is given to you. That's in the Bible, & I see the truth of it everywhere.

So how do you do that? At first, you probably have to force yourself. It's called "acting as if." You act as if whatever you need is already here. I thank God daily for abundance & prosperity, financial freedom even though I haven't seen the manifestation yet. I thank Him sincerely, because I know it's on its way. I also thank Him for the abundance I do have visible, like cats & linens & dishes & friends & family & love & blog topics & messages. At first, I had to say it even when I didn't feel it. I had to search my brain for things to be grateful for. Next came actually feeling the gratitude for the good things I already have. Some of it came from not having briefly, like heat & electricity. Then came the true feelings of gratitude for abundance & prosperity even though I don't see them yet. I sometimes don't feel the gratitude, when the fear comes back but I speak in gratitude anyway. Then if I really need to, I tell Him of my fears & offer then up to Him. I'm honest with Him, talk with Him as if He was a friend sitting with me - because He is. I talk with Him about my fears when I need to, but I still maintain the most gratitude & positive attitude I can. It truly is nothing but mind over matter, & we can control our minds & then our emotions. First, believe you can. Then "act as if." That's called "visualization." Once you practice this daily, you can turn your attitude & then your life around. Then for those times that you just can't, please remember that we're all human. Remind yourself that it's just drama that we all get caught up in from time to time, but that it's not real. Just as time & space are relative, so are our dramas. They're in our own minds so we're actually master of them. It just takes understanding this, then the will to make the changes & following through with them. More tomorrow.