Finally! Some success! I say this as though I’ve endured long years of backbreaking labor to get here. When in reality it’s been only 2.5 months since I moved to New Jersey and only 6 short days since I began using “the process” And this is also considering that the ultimate result of the process is to not depend on the hologram for happiness, and to in fact bust loose from it.
Today the results came in three incredibly noticeable ways.
Morning Pages
The morning pages are amazing. They are the uncensored self bursting through and creating. I actually can’t wait to do them tomorrow. I’d say the allure of them is it’s completely free. For instance, in this blog, though I do talk about a wide range of topics many of which are personal, I still have to censor and edit what I say. I have to put my complete thoughts into coherent sentences, consider things like flow and word count, and make sure I cover my topic as objectively and lucidly as I can. In free writing I can switch topics, write just for the sound of the words, expunge my deepest emotional pains, and be more honest and clear with myself. Clarity is produced by the morning pages. I can’t recommend them enough to anyone walking an artistic or spiritual path. And doing this gave me inspiration to write about other things.
In addition to the morning pages, I’ve decided to go on a reading diet, as I tend to numb, distract, and ultimately sabotage myself by reading. I’m planning to do this for at least a week. Right now, I’ve found clever ways to rationalize checking my email and facebook just as often. I figure baby steps are in order, as I’ve already freed up a lot of time by not reading movie blogs.
Bills
Bills have always been a pain for me. I usually am in some sort of denial with causes me to pay them late, because I really don’t want to pay them at all. Well in the process of internalizing money as the breath of life (spend and it will come back to you just as naturally) I was actually looking forward to bill paying this time. I wanted to see if it was possible to reframe something as negative as bill paying.
Well the act of paying the bill didn’t feel nearly as negative, but all the busywork involved (finding the number, calling, figuring out which extension, waiting on hold, etc) felt just as negative as it usually does. But I felt much more secure this time in “spending” money to pay bills and being able to believe for fleeting seconds that I was simply sending money into the ether where it would naturally come back.
Negative thoughts also accompanied my analysis of how much money I would have left over. I’m starting to believe that focus is the action that solidifies reality in the quantum sense. If our observation remains fuzzy, then it’s possible for things to magically appear, but if it remains fixed on a certain object, then that object stays locked in a quantum stasis. Maybe this is why truly a watched pot never boils.
Fear ultimately won over faith here and I carefully calculated (focused on solid reality) the numbers such that I wouldn’t pay more than I had in my bank account. I will try to look at things more “fuzzily” in the future.
There is however, no sense of lingering dread associated with bill paying at the moment like there was before. And any time I recognized negativity I applied the process. And the process so far has given me the ability to at least detach my current emotion from its’ trigger and let me feel a temporary (like 5 seconds) sense of unconditional love towards the hologram.
Expanding Social Life
The lack of this has been a major factor in the mounting resistance I’ve felt in the past couple of months. I’ve mostly been hanging out with my parents, which is cool, but it’s like going to school to be a filmmaker and learning only about the boom mic. There are so many more people out there to meet.
Tonight I went to a comedy club which turned out to be free, a great show, and a great place to meet people or take people you’ve already met. The icing on the cake (and what restored my faith in this experiment) was that I met a girl who happened to have just moved here two weeks ago from a place I had been before (Madison, WI ) and who happened to live four blocks from me. I was in New York, an area along with New Jersey comprised of some fifteen to twenty million people. And on my first night out in the city, I met a girl with similar spiritual views who not only lives in my city in Jersey, but only four short blocks away!
Synchronicity anyone? Yeah. I think this is working.