Are you hoping you can change your life the easy way? If someone offered you a quick fix, perhaps some power mantra, magical chant, a charm you could wear, a release point you could press that would remove all bad luck or inner subconscious issues, or perhaps some yoga position you could assume once a day, would you try it?

We hope for a magic formula, because the longer we remain in a life that doesn’t work for us, the more desperately we seek a quick fix. Unfortunately, there really is no easy fix, but there will always be someone willing to offer one in exchange for money.

In truth, our challenges would go immediately with our surrender. While we cling to our problems with tight fists, we hope that some quick fix will chase them away. We avoid the path of change and growth until the pain becomes too great. Pain precedes change, and eventually drives growth.

Our lives are designed in such a way as to facilitate our spiritual healing, at the expense of our mental, physical, and emotional peace and well-being. This design includes challenges and pain–learning to let go, learning to reach out, learning to love, learning to forgive–and through it all, becoming greater, and so much more than we had been before. Our only real purpose is growth.

Our soul’s growth is primary. We don’t want to hear this. Modern-day societal expectations don’t mesh with a concept that implies we must endure some pain and spend time and attention on ourselves doing spiritual work.

Spiritual healing presents an unchangeable course. It has not responded to our demands of an instant fix. A loving and unprejudiced creative energy moves us toward wholeness, via our own growth, whether we like it or not. Because we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and not simply bodies having a life, we must tend to the needs of spirit.

If we knew how to manage life from the outset, change and growth would be so much easier. In a society more sensitive to our spiritual needs, perhaps mandatory early reading would include a guidebook for living an abundant and healthy life. We now know that the map for success lies within our own thinking and belief systems, which develops at an early age.

“What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.”

The contents in our mind determine our health, our life circumstances, how well we function, and our emotional well-being. But, when you consider that major medical insurers would not cover mental health therapy until late in the last century, you can see how slow progress has been in appreciating this important concept.

The idea that thoughts, belief systems and feelings affected our life, was neglected. Those seeking therapy or emotional healing were labeled weak, needy, or thought to require too much attention. Now we know that attending to mental health needs is more than a privilege. Forgotten memories are not forgotten problems; we know that traumatic events, especially those repressed, and even those that occur at too young an age to remain in conscious memory, have great impact on the quality of our lives. They impact our relationships, our productivity, our health, and our level of happiness. We now know, as of the 21st century, the importance of what occurs on the mental plane. We still have much to learn.

The spiritually-aware have a greater advantage. The spiritual seeker accounts for what happens at the soul level, as well as on an energy level. This expands and facilitates our ability to heal. We have many tools available to us in our healing work, as opposed to standard counseling. 

In alternative/spiritual healing, we might discover some pre-birth or other lifetime issue to be a block. Does standard therapy help this? There are methods that can help us when we hit a stick-point in our work. When we have committed to the spiritual path and surrendered to our growth, we will always be led to the next step in our progression. We must let go of the blocks, the people, the beliefs, or lifestyle, that keep us rooted in unhappiness. When some thought pattern remains, we can consider that a healer working on the right level can help us progress.

A painful condition or life experience has led to miraculous healing for many. Extreme emotional pain–either caused by life circumstances or threat of a painful or fatal physical illness–was the common thread. Does a shift require extreme pain? I don’t think so, but for most people, pain does seem to be the impetus to growth. Some of us need harder knocks to break through our excuses, rationalizations, and the hugely defensive ego. Perhaps some of us ignored the pain till it became so great that it erupted in a huge tidal wave.

If you would like to learn some healing method or try some system or process that someone has developed from his/her own healing journey, remember that each person’s journey is individualized. Do not rely upon it as the answer for you, or consider yourself a failure if that method does not succeed for you. Take what you learn and modify it to your own needs. Develop the inner guidance you need to follow through on your path.

Life presents no challenge for which you do not also have the inner knowledge to overcome. And each and every challenge is a gift that ultimately leads to freedom and joy.

Law of attraction has great power in attracting that which we want, but unfortunately, it also draws conditions that we do not want. Our ability to create the life that we want hinges on the thoughts, beliefs, and programs we harbor, consciously or subconsciously. The deeper, subconscious thought patterns that are the product of our earliest learning tend to be the thoughts that most draw our life experiences to us. These programs present an obstruction to our goals. We can’t hope to use law of attraction in a productive and positive way with the same faulty thought systems. 

In much the same way that a computer program produces a predictable result when it runs, you will find that your subconscious programs do so as well. If you review your history, you might notice that themes, whether positive or negative, had a tendency to repeat. Although the circumstances changed over time, you had a sense of familiarity, or déjà vu, each time. These patterns may have revolved around health conditions or physical ailments, in career or work-related issues, in finances, or in relationships. You might see addictions repeat, although the substance, food, or type may change.

Have you chosen romantic partners that were similar to previous partners, even if they did not at first appear that way? If abuse, jealousy, lack of support, infidelity, emotional absence or other behaviors repeat, there is a pattern. If you find health issues throughout your life that produced a similar emotional or life difficulty, or re-occuring financial problems, that is a pattern. If feelings of depression, hopelessness, or anxiety re-occur, that is a pattern. A destructive belief system underlies each of these patterns, whether they are circumstances, people that you attract, or feelings.

Once you have pinpointed patterns, you can get a sense of  the programs that run your life. These thoughts fuel law of attraction to invite negative people and situations into your life, and they drive your conscious thinking patterns, causing you to make choices to include them. Healing will eliminate these belief systems, and then the conditions. 

Growth requires acute awareness of our intentions, motivations, and actions. To achieve success, you must look inside yourself with awareness and responsibility. When you face the inner demons, they become real. However, the problems they cause diminish, simply by acceptance and recognition. Since you created them, only you can let them go. As with so much of our lives, it comes down to choice.

Imagine the peace and serenity you will feel when you no longer hold onto anxieties and fears that block you in life. Know that the path to freedom and joy waits beyond each and every perceived roadblock.

The principles of success require that we maintain an optimistic mindset. Negative life experiences take their toll, leaving us more conservative, fearful,  and less trusting as time passes. This trend seems to worsen with age, causing many to lose the fresh and optimistic expectations that come more naturally to the young. As we grow older, more than ever, we will need to push ourselves to overcome negative thinking.

This conservative and more fearful approach results in a need for predictability and habit. We see people choose the comfortable and known path, rather than venture out or attempt change, even when it is far less than they want. We see many elect to stay in safe though undesirable conditions, such as what hapens in many marriages, until that safe known becomes so painful that it is unbearable. Rather than actively creating desirable circumstances either by leaving or attempting to change the circumstances, they keep the status quo. Rather than giving them the measure of control they may feel they have, it represents more of a managed failure.

Managed failures exist in relationships, in career, and in health matters. Fear of attempting something different, or even believing they can have something different based on past experience, causes people to hang onto undesirable circumstances. The conditions afford safety, if nothing else. And predictability and safety seems to become more of a priority as we age.

An area where many exhibit untrue belief systems is in relationships. More people than ever resist commitment, and fewer people re-marry following divorce. Fear of hurt and rejection is one of the most profound fears humans experience, because of early loving, or unloving, experiences with parents, siblings, and others. So, as men and women collect negative experiences, they reinforce the programs that keep them from opening their heart in a loving and innocent way. They learn to protect themselves from the pain of failure and rejection by acting in a manner that seems clear would sabotage any chance for a fulfilling intimate relationship. Destructive behaviors might be unconscious, but just as often, the individuals are completely aware of their actions. Rather than modifying their behavior in the hopes of producing success, they continue to follow the same patterns. If not unconscious, we can only say it is deliberate.

When, with awareness, we continue to sabotage our health by following a particular path, how can we explain it? If we have gotten bad results in the past from following a physician’s advice, treatment path, or taking a prescription medication which only exacerbated a condition, why would we continue to do it?

We should gain knowledge from experience rather than fear. Do we learn from those experiences to go on and produce better outcomes with some necessary modification of our own behavior, or do we simply repeat the process over and over, to get the same results each time? While we become fearful and less trusting about what awaits us, it is our own repetitious thinking, behavior, and choices that bring about the same negative results.

Choose to learn from experience. With wisdom, alter self-sabotaging choices and behaviors that bring about failure. Then, armed with awareness and change, develop positive expectations for success. Expect the best outcome, and believe in miracles and luck with every risk and choice. No matter what has passed before, always expect miraculous change in your life. Risk success!

If you feel you have waited too long to create effective and satisfactory change in your life in a particular area, you should belive that it is never too late to alter that trend. The only reason it may appear to be more daunting is because your patterns, most notably your thinking patterns, are more habituated. There is nothing more worthwhile than love, happiness and success, at any stage in life.

 

Many people seeking spiritual growth or personal development have a basic desire for freedom. This desire often serves as a driving need for change. Inner freedom allows us to pursue our dreams and goals without interference or limit. The constraints in our mind keep us where we are in life, and prevent us from creating or allowing external change. This is really the only limit we really need lifted in order to achieve personal success and happiness.

We all define freedom in different ways. Although we may feel that having financial abundance would provide real freedom, we’ve all seen examples of wealthy people trapped by their own addictions, fears, or negative thinking. We can probably agree that while they have achieved financial independence, they do not have inner peace and true freedom. So freedom is an inner state of mind, as well as an external condition.

Negative and fearful thinking puts in place boundaries that imprison us. For an extreme example to prove a point, imagine that you had all the money in the world. And obviously, with a huge bank account, you could do whatever you desired, including travel to beautiful and exotic places. But what if you feared travel? Imagine being terrified to leave your home. Agoraphobics face that fear daily. An unfree mind imposes numerous conditions and limits.

Any unhappy circumstances you find yourself in results from your thinking. If you have any fears or self-doubt, they hold you back from the life you want. For example, if you fear intimacy and love, you will not find true joy in a loving relationship. You will likely choose the path or person that doesn’t challenge your fear. If you fear for your personal safety, you will not want to travel or go out comfortably into the world and enjoy the activities that you might otherwise desire. If you have fears about your own competence and value, you will not move into the career that you want, be with the mate that you want, and not feel valuable enough to get what you deserve. You will hesitate to move toward goals out of fear of failure. While anger is truly a self-defeating emotion to hold onto, fear is by far, the reason most people live out their lives in a dissatisfying way.

Fears not only hold us back from our heart’s desires, but they have the power to attract negative conditions that validate the belief systems that cause those fears. If you fear intimacy out of a belief that you will be hurt by infidelity, you may draw that very situation to you. If you believe that the world is an unsafe place, you may manifest conditions that validate that thought. We can’t predict the outcome to the negative thoughts that we harbor. Our lives are designed in such a way that we are often given just what we can handle, and no more, that will push us through restrictions and free us to love more, be more, and live more.

Understand that most of your fears are not valid. They do not keep you safe, they only hold you back. We know perfectly well when a fear is reasonable, and when it is not. Begin now to "feel the fear and do it anyway." With intelligent discernment, make choices that are not dictated by your fears. If you want something, move towards it, and don’t listen to the negative internal voices. As you consciously work to overcome these fears, you will eliminate them.  Ignore them, and they will persist.

As the repressed unconscious thoughts heal, we come to enjoy a new state of being without the anxiety, fear, anger and negativity that once ruled our choices and actions. This is an attainable goal, and ultimately what you will find on your journey of growth.

We need to achieve on an inner level first what we hope to find in the outer world. So while we work on manifesting the outer condition of financial freedom, and other abundant conditions, we need to free ourselves of every condition which detracts from our internal sense of freedom. This only requires a willingness on our part to release negative thoughts of self-criticism and undervalued self-worth, as well as those judgmental beliefs that we often feel self-righteous about.

While you feel that your belief systems are infallible and universal truths, they are only judgments that you have come to accept as truth. They may be judgments about what people are, what marriage is, what life is, what government is, how fair the judicial system, who you are, and so forth. Many of your beliefs are counterproductive to creating the desirable conditions that you want. You need to begin to eliminate all those beliefs to which you have attached some negative judgment, regardless of what you perceive as truth. Persisting in negative beliefs will only create undesirable conditions that validate those beliefs. If you want to shape a new and different reality, you need to believe in a different reality. Sometimes we feel that we are willing to believe a different truth if we see or experience it, but it’s almost always true that we first need to believe it before we will see it. The principles of law of attraction tell us that is precisely what we must do.

Remember that thoughts within the mind have a magnetic pull that attracts like objects or situations in the external world. The Creative Mind offers no room for rationalizations, excuses or disclaimers. In the infinite and diverse universe that we live in, there is no universal truth for all people. Each and every individual has an entirely different reality.

Know that joy, freedom and love is out there and available to all, not only a select few. Believe that it is your right and destiny, and commit to achieving it.

A necessary first step in learning how to use the law of attraction to your advantage is to recognize your responsibility in creating your life so far. As you become more fully aware to what degree you shaped your life through past actions and choices, you see that you have control over much of your life experience. When you consciously acknowledge control, you empower change. On the conscious level, you begin to monitor and choose thoughts as well as actions that best serve you. Through the force of law of attraction, these thoughts will manifest positive results and opportunities that will validate the real power of law of attraction.

If you believe that luck, karma, coincidence and chance have created your life, you reduce or remove your power to effect positive change as well as your motivation to do so in any committed way. Recognizing how you’ve shaped your life through your own choices and actions forces you to see how powerful choice really is. You begin to see how often you chose a course, whether or not you realized you had. You need to stop and review your life up to now with an honest and open attitude to recognize just how much influence you have had in shaping your life.

When you arm yourself with this awareness, you begin to see opportunity for choice where previously you did not. You begin to use discernment and guidance to make wiser choices and to take positive action that will move you toward your goals. In this way, you cooperate with universal law to effect productive change.

Your subconscious lays the foundation for a spectrum of choices and conditions. Then your conscious mind, operating within that framework, directed your actions, which brought you your job, your home, and the people with whom you surround yourself. You may have had negative thoughts regarding some of these possible choices, and yet, you still decided, through your own individualized thought process, to take the action that brought about the results you see. Different actions would have produced different results. So we see people from similar backgrounds, even from the same family, achieve widely different results, simply as a result of making different choices.

Mental activity, or thought, on both the conscious and unconscious levels, fuel action. For example, before you took your job, you thought of applying for it. Those thoughts then caused you to act to acquire the job. Your subconscious, or unconscious thoughts, also played a hand in your decision to act. These programs or belief systems instilled long ago fueled thoughts regarding the type of work or career you should choose, the level of income that you receive for your work or where your talents lie that would provide you with income. Consciously you may not agree with that belief system, wanting instead to earn a larger income or choose a different profession, but as long as your core beliefs remain untouched in the subconscious, they have huge influence in your life on many levels.

If you are married, you accepted a marriage proposal or gave it. You consented by spoken word, and took action when you walked down the aisle. Regardless of how much thought you put into it, and admittedly, few people put as much thought into it as they should, you expended mental energy and focused on the result, which caused you to take action. At the same time, your subconscious mind provided material for your conscious thinking, by supplying the thought systems regarding love, marriage, and what type of mate attracted you. You might even have had conscious objections to your current mate, or you might have received instinctive guidance that you did not honor. You were driven by the thoughts contained in your subconscious.

Belief systems, programs and patterns within the subconscious fuel thoughts. Thoughts fuel choices. Choices drive action.

But, the content in your mind becomes critical when you factor in law of attraction, which states that thoughts attract matching events in the outer world. So, all of your thoughts have creative potential, even the ones that don’t give rise to choice or action on your part. Negative beliefs within the subconscious serve to oppose conscious goals, and also, in and of themselves, have the power to create undesirable conditions simply by attracting them. So these subconscious thoughts have much more power than your positive conscious intentions. This is a key point to understanding why you see the results before you.

The subconscious has a very powerful role in creating your life. It serves as judge and jury on every desire that you want to deliberately manifest. Any intentions or thoughts that the subconscious finds to be untrue by virtue of prior learning will simply not manifest. Second, the subconscious forms a basis for your natural conscious thought patterns and choices. You feel comfortable staying within the boundaries the subconscious sets. Your conscious mind can learn to, and should, dismiss any limited or negative thinking that the subconscious, trained by a lifetime of experiences, will want to impose.

Underlying negativity affects your well-being, restricts your freedom of choice, attracts undesirable events, and limits the opportunities that are drawn to you. When you release these negative beliefs and programs, you become empowered to create a positive and healthy reality.

Set your goals and visions in place and act on them. The universe provides opportunity. It is your choices and actions that set events in motion. By working with law of attraction, you will effectively learn how to increase the positive opportunities that come to you and eliminate or reduce unwanted experiences. Evaluate the choices and actions you make on a daily basis. If they contradict your intentions and desires, you need to commit to your own goals. Remain mindful of your thoughts and the tone of your mental environment, and if there are thoughts out of alignment with your vision, dismiss them. Through repetition of positive affirmations and beliefs, you change negative mental habit. Focus and have faith in your vision and support your goals in every way.

Success comes to those willing to commit with unwavering persistence. Committing to change first requires an open and willing attitude. You’ll find yourself tested with challenges that require you to develop tremendous inner courage. Ultimately you hope to see outer success as a result of the inner work you have done, but it usually takes some time. This will require you to develop the patience of a champion.

Unfortunately, while people may decide they want change, they rarely want to do the work for the time required to see tangible results. Understandably, they often get impatient to see change on any level, whether in regard to physical healing, mental healing, or life healing. While it has taken an entire lifetime to create what we see in the form of our financial condition, relationships, health, and general happiness overall, we may irrationally want instantaneous results. We tend to lose focus and move onto something else that offers a quicker return. There really is no easier or quicker way than inner healing work. That is ultimately the only way.

If you are going through a divorce that is causing financial and emotional difficulties, you need to look at it from the perspective that a bad situation is moving out. It is a situation undergoing the process of change. You may have traded what appears like one bad situation for another, but in reality, you are working towards an improvement. You have to view any negative circumstances in that way, when you are actively working on improvement.

Many people often neglect to realistically assess their starting place when working towards goals of self-improvement. If you have heard about the "illusion" of time, forget it now. If you have heard that it only takes the universe "one second," forget that one, too. It’s a whole lot more fun to contemplate change when we think it might take a second, but it’s unrealistic, given our starting point, to transform negative conditions in a second, in a week, month, or possibly even a year or more! Understand the necessity of cultivating the art of patience.

Do not allow your current situation to weigh upon you. It will pass. You may look at this and say, "How can I feel positive with this going on around me?" or "How can I feel healthy when I am sick?" Optimism becomes part of the healing process. Not only must you believe that the situation will pass, you must believe that it will ultimately produce the best possible results. The current situation is a part of yesterday. At some point, it will merely be history. Then, you can forget it entirely. For today, plod through with courage, and do not focus on negativity, as bleak as circumstances may seem. Focusing on the negative will encourage negative conditions to remain. Use the momentum of change to swing to the positive as you focus on positive change at all times.

People seem more willing to put time and energy into areas that do not hold as great a promise to transform their lives. Perhaps the pain of looking within serves as the impetus for seeking outer distractions and material possessions. But at the end of the day, no amount of money or stuff can substitute for inner peace and happiness. While you may at times feel overwhelmed by the inner work required to change your thoughts or habits, know that the longer you put off the necessary inner work, the more ingrained and habitual the patterns become. The best you can hope to achieve, lacking real change, is tolerant complacency to your own dissatisfaction. Eventually you will find that change is an inside job.

You will not find any better system to change your life. There is nothing more worthwhile than committing to your own growth. You can effect powerful change in your life right now with your growing awareness. It’s reasonable to want change to motivate you to keep moving forward, and this will happen. With the internal changes, your perspective will change. You will change. And then life will transform.