Princess Stories...for the girls...

This post is for the girls! A few months ago a friend of mine recommended a book so I called the library and put myself on the waiting list. By the time it arrived I had forgotten all about it. I turned the book over to read the back, wondering what it was about. When I got to the part that said something about 'Lucinda looking up from cleaning the floor right into the eyes of the prince,' my heart gave a thrill. A princess story! I love princess stories! I couldn't wait to get home and start it.

We all want to marry a prince!
Why do we love princess stories? I pondered this as I drove home and came to a conclusion. In our hearts, we desire to be provided for, and provided for well. If a girl marries a prince, the implication is that she will never want. She will never have to worry over how to pay the bills, she won't have to leave her children to go to work. She won't have to balance working outside the home with running a home. She will not have the burden of being a provider and this represents a freedom, a lightness, a peace and security that we as wives and mothers long for.

And yet how many of us fill that role?

We're the Fixers
As mothers and wives, sisters and daughters, it comes naturally to us to nurture, to have compassion, and to fix. In fact, we can be so capable that those around us can take for granted all the problems we take care of.

It comes naturally to us to be a strength emotionally to those who depend on us. It comes naturally to us to hold things together during hard times, to set our own needs aside time and again for the survival of the family.

I speak to so many women who are doing just that for their family. They are balancing mothering, wife-ing, community serving, and yes, financially providing. On top of that they are trying to take care of themselves, to eat right and exercise, and grow spiritually. A good friend of mine who has recently started working full time to help ends meet said to me, "This isn't how I wanted my life to be. But I just need to accept it."

What we feel we deserve in our heart of hearts...
If our life have gotten to a point where we feel it isn't what we wanted, we need to consider the possibility that on some level it is what we feel we deserve. My friend is partly right. It's true that accepting and being grateful for where we are at is an extremely powerful part of the formula for creating a life we love. But there's more, and without two other pieces to the puzzle, we are spinning our wheels. We must have a clear vision of what we want and we must feel in our hearts that what we want is what we deserve.

Alma 37:41-42 says, "Nevertheless, because those miracles were worked by small means it did show unto them marvelous works. They were slothful, and forgot to exercise their faith and diligence and then those marvelous works ceased, and they did not progress in their journey; Therefore, they tarried in the wilderness, or did not travel a direct course, and were afflicted with hunger and thirst, because of their transgressions." (italics added)

Don't log out all you tenderhearted women out there. Wait and see where I'm going with this. I promise this is a message of hope and knowledge, not guilt and criticism. We do that enough to ourselves! I know you're thinking, "Yeah, yeah. I need to have more faith. I transgress all the time." And you dig your heels in to get back to work, but doesn't it feel like you just keep on spinning?

What does having more faith mean to you? Does it mean you think and focus and concentrate a little harder? Do you pucker your forehead and tense your muscles and think, 'faith, faith, faith?' What does it mean, anyway???

I think you have lots of faith. But maybe you are tarrying in the wilderness and not traveling a direct course or progressing like you want to. Maybe you are afflicted with hunger and thirst and maybe in this case the transgressions are principles of the law that you aren't living simply because you don't quite understand them yet. But consequences of law occur whether we understand them or not.

I love how that verse says, 'exercise faith.' It's a verb, an action, but again, what is it? I believe it is having a clear vision of what you want and with that vision feeling all of the emotions that go along with hope and love. Yep, faith, hope, and charity.

Do you know what you want? Or only what you don't want?
You are busy, you are amazing, you probably don't even have time to be reading this right now, so here's what I want you to start with: Start creating a vision in your mind of how you would like things to be. Try your hardest not to counteract your vision with doubt and fear and cynicism. A few times a day, when you are driving, right before you fall asleep, in the shower, over lunch, in your prayers, when you are stretching after a walk, just go away to princess land. Picture in your mind how you would like your life to be.

It's so simple, but it's work. Trust that it is work that will bring positive consequences.

If you are in serious frustration and overwhelm, just pick 2 or 3 things to start with. It might go like this: 1-Picture yourself spending quality time with each individual in your family. Feel the feelings of peace and love and gratitude you would feel in that moment. 2-Picture yourself balancing your checkbook and seeing that you had enough and to spare. Again, feel the emotions of gratitude and abundance and humble awe. 3-Picture yourself taking care of yourself. Getting to bed on time, eating healthy, exercising, and feeding your spirit.

Make your visions as real as you can. Those are three great things to start with, but maybe it's different for you. Maybe in each of those visions you can be aware of the tidy organized space around you.

Then leave your vision and get back to life. You are amazing. Look at what you have created so far with your faith, determination, and hard work. You can create this, too. Leave it in God's hands for now, all you need to do right now is be clear on what you want.

Be careful when you finish visualizing and come back to your life that you continue to be grateful for what is. Like my friend said, accept what is in the present. Later in the chapter (v. 46) Alma goes on to say: "O my son, do not let us be slothful because of the easiness of the way; for so was it with our fathers; for so was it prepared for them, that if they would look they might live; even so it is with us. The way is prepared, and if we will look we may live forever."

Could it really be that easy? Could having a vision in our mind of where we want to go really be that powerful of a catalyst to get us there? What else, then, is hope, if not a clear vision of what we want, and a trust that God wants to give it to us?

Establish Hope
At the heart of having hope for the vision we have created is conquering the belief that we don't deserve that life. Here are some things to do to increase your hope, your belief that God does want to bless you with the desires of your heart:

• Go outside and look at the mountains. Or the ocean, or the stars, or a flower. There is a clear message in these creations from God to you. The message is that He has created this for you. He wants you to enjoy his bounty. He wants you to experience the good things in life. It is effortless for you to look up at that mountain and receive the gift of His creation. Allow yourself to receive the blessings He is pouring out on you.

• Remember the example given in the bible of the child who asked his father for bread. Jesus asked if that father would give the child a stone instead. Or would the father give the child a snake when asked for a fish? Of course not. And yet isn't that how we see God sometimes? He wants to give us what we have asked for. We need to live the laws and be willing to receive.

• If you are a parent, think of your own children. If it was lunchtime and your child went to your fridge, opened it, looked at you and tentatively asked, "is it okay if I have a sandwich from this fridge?" What would you feel? Most likely you would laugh at the silliness of the question. "Of course you can have a sandwich. Everything I have is yours. Eat. Take care of yourself. There's plenty." Is it possible that this is how God feels about giving to us, too?

• Use the affirmation, "I deserve to be provided for in abundance." As you say these words, there are a couple of things you need to understand 'behind' the words. First of all it is not an entitled kind of deserving. It is a humble awareness of who you really are and what a child of God deserves simply because of who they are. On the flip side, be aware that there is nothing special or unusual about you. Everyone deserves to be provided for in abundance. Not all of us are manifesting that in our circumstances because we are still learning the laws. We are also in different places as far as what we are allowing ourselves to deserve based on our own beliefs about deserving.

• Here's the clincher: "But I don't think God really wants me to have abundance. Clearly He doesn't, look at my life." That's baloney. Don't believe it. Seriously. Fast, pray, really get in tune. I can almost guarantee that God isn't going to tell you, "For you, no. Sorry. There's not enough for you." The closest you might get to that response is, "You need to learn some things first." But behind those words are, "So, please, get learning them. I'm anxious to bless you. I have work for you to do." We are deceiving ourselves if we think that He's holding out on us. That line of thinking is a cop out. When you do withhold from your children for their own good, how anxiously are you watching for the first sign that you can give them what they want? And it all depends on them. Things are more within the sphere of our agency than we realize.

• Look at what's already good and beautiful in your life. This will help you realize that you do deserve good things, you've already been blessed with them. Try to make a connection in your mind and heart between the good you have already been blessed with and the good you hope to learn to manifest in your life. God wants you to manifest it, too.
  

• Finally girls, be accountable for where you are at. Have you created this because it is what you feel you deserve? Heal that part inside of you, affirm that you deserve to be provided for abundantly. This isn't about your husband and his paycheck, as much as you might have convinced yourself that it is. This is about you and God. How this truth comes to pass in your life is up to God, so tune in. It will be different for each one of you. It will be unexpected how it happens. He is the giver of all good things, but if we've got both hands out blocking the abundance He wishes to bestow on us, we have only ourselves to blame. And that's actually great news because the only person you can change is you.
  

Changing feelings of undeserving can take time. Feeling undeserving can blur our vision of what we really want. The first step is clarifying that vision once more and working on it daily. Trust that even if you can't see immediate results, the steps you are taking now are without a doubt changing your future. Let Him heal you and provide for you.

In the end, it isn't really about the prince. It's about being a princess. It's about knowing what you want and believing that you deserve it. That's what we yearn for and admire in the princess stories. Let yourself be that princess, know that you deserve it, that all of us deserve it! Keep your vision clear and strong and know that you are starting on an amazing, life changing journey.

(Watch for an upcoming post on how not fully understanding the law of agency pushes away what we really want in life!)

My Favorite Story

It seems that whenever I read about using law of attraction principles to increase my prosperity, I read things like, "I tripled my income in 3 months!" Or, "I earned $40,000 in 20 minutes". Or even, "I doubled my income in less than 1 year!".

These statements are exciting, and draw us in. My experiences so far however, have not been like that. I am beginning to think that if those statements are true, it would be very enlightening to examine those individuals lives for the 2-5 years previous to those 3 months, or 20 minutes, or 1 year.

Learning these principles take time. Don't get discouraged if you start changing your way of thinking and don't experience such rapid results. Trust that you are on the path. I have found, however, that the further down the path I get, the more accelerated the results become. Things start to come together quickly.

The examples mentioned above can be misleading because the law of attraction always works in the simplest and easiest ways. You will have results that come without drama or fanfare most of the time. But you will have results.

So I wanted to get personal and share my favorite example of how simply and logically applying the law of attraction in your life can get you results.

Laser Focus
I had read in a post from Leslie Householder at http://thoughtsalive.com/ that when we are using visualization to achieve our goals, it helps if we can narrow it down to one or two goals at a time, giving each of those goals a 'laser focus'.

I decided that my top two financial goals were to acquire food storage and 6 months cash reserves. I figured to get the food storage and the cash reserves would mean I would need to save around $20,000. It was October, and I set the goal to be reached in 1 years time.

I am a trusting and optimistic person by nature and began my visualizations with laser focus just like Leslie taught. If nothing changed in our situation, I figured it would take about 5 years to reach that goal. I fully expected that within the next year we would be the happy recipients of some amazing landfall of money. Maybe my husband would get a new job with a huge increase. I had all sorts of exciting scenarios playing out as possibilities in my mind.

Much to my surprise and delight, we reached our goal, but there were no dramatic changes in our income, in fact there was hardly a change at all. Three unexpected things happened.

Spending Changes
For years I had been in charge of most of our finances. I recorded expenses, watched the budget, etc. But about a month after I started my laser focus visualizations, my husband took a sudden interest in the details of our 'accounts payable'. Over about 3 full Saturdays, he sat down with our online banking account and recorded every penny that had been spent the previous 3 months. He showed me the results and we made a revised budget. We planned out the next year more realistically based on his work.

His vigilance continued and for the next 5 months, he checked our accounts every night, recorded our expenses, and consulted with me (the spender of money in the family) on where we were at and how much money was left. I loved having someone help me keep track. It was motivating to know he'd be checking every night and we were a team with our goals. He would say things like, "if we don't spend anything else this week, we'll reach our savings goal." (Which was code for, "if you don't spend anything else this week, we'll reach our savings goal!") I would get excited and be careful not to spend anything else that week.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, we saved at least 10% each of those months, significantly increasing our savings account. It was exciting and I learned a lot from him about controlling spending, something he's very good at. It is interesting to note here, that I had said nothing to him about my visualizations.

Food Storage
The summer before I set this goal, gas prices had risen to an unprecedented amount. They fell in the fall, but over the winter everyone predicted that food would follow in the price increase in the spring. We had been hesitant before this time to fork out the lump sum to buy a lot of food storage at once. But after listening to the predictions, we decided it would be wise to get our food storage as soon as possible. I just wasn't sure how we'd come up with the money.

My husband looked at our budget and suggested that this year when he got one of his 2 extra checks, instead of using it to go on a family vacation like we normally did, we'd use it to buy our food storage instead, and do some inexpensive camping that summer for family vacations. So that March we bought rice, wheat, beans, flour, sugar, and many other staples for food storage.

It was a dream come true. Just like I had visualized, I would go down into my storage room and stare at all my shelves full of food. Knowing that I could feed my family no matter what gave me so much peace!

New information
So now we had food storage and lots more savings, and it had only been 6 months. I figured we still had a long way to go for our cash reserves to be complete. But then one day my husband, still tracking expenses religiously, got curious about exactly how much cash we would need to survive for 6 months of unemployment.

He got more detailed than I ever had and thought of a few things I had not considered. Unemployment checks, for one. An old IRA from my teaching job years ago that I had forgotten, for another. By the time he was done with his spreadsheet, guess how many months of cash reserves we had? 5 months. Over the next 6 months we continued to save and by the time we reached the year mark for my goal, we didn't have $20,000 in savings, but we had 6 months cash reserves and food storage. How amazing is that?

It might be simpler than you think
So, what I learned is that we don't have to know the 'how' in order to visualize where we want to be. If I would have asked myself how I was going to get an extra $20,000 in one year and started obsessing about that, I might never have put the energy and hope into visualizing my goal. Now I have the peace of mind of knowing that I have cash reserves and food storage. And I always chuckle when I think of how simply it came to pass! I love it!