for quick & easy FOCUS & ALIGNMENT  Photo of cloudy sky with dark clouds in color variations. From Osarugue Igbinoba on Unsplash. (Have you ever noticed you can follow the bold print in each post to get the gist of it for a quick read and to find where you may want to go in more deeply? Yup.) Today’s piece-of-cake process requires no paper or pen, just the capacity to move through a threshold from indoors to outdoors. If that’s difficult or you can’t leave the premises in the moment you have the impulse to reach for this process (and do follow those impulses!), do you have access to a window? Just look out. Better still if you can open the window for even a moment, in any weather, and breathe a bit of fresh air. STEP OUTSIDE I step outside early in the day, sometimes just for a minute or two, sometimes to hang out for a few. I do this in the midst of my other focusing processes because, seriously, going outside (or your variation of that) fully counts as an alignment process. I’ve met some birds, squirrels, cottontails, and raccoons that way. The bird song is remarkably present in all weathers (even if scant), and the crescendo of music in the springtime is downright life-giving. It’s nice to learn the temperature by encountering it, experiencing it, not reading about it. If you don’t like how it feels, see if you can appreciate the contrast between inside and out; enjoy both the variety and your preference. Gauging the movement in the air as it plays all around you allows a specific kind of connection to consciousness. Air can feel still (almost silent!), flowy, breezy, windy. Watching current air movements register in the rippling branches of trees is a presence practice in itself, calling forth your own ongoing dance with consciousness. And, oh, the sky. The great, ever-present sky, I have learned, provides constant solace.MAKE A GAME OF FINDING COLORS IN THE SKY Spending time in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, right by the ocean, I was struck by the insane number of beautiful colors in the sky. I developed a habit of being on the beach, usually practicing Qigong, for the hour leading up to and lingering just past sunset. As the sun sets or rises, the shifts are so quick you can almost decipher them (even see them quite clearly) with the naked eye. Watch for this anywhere on the planet. (I once wrote about a little life lesson or reminder from the swiftly changing Caribbean sky.) I’m in Kansas now, landlocked, living in a townhouse in a little cul-de-sac. When I step outside, I see other houses that look almost exactly like my mom’s. My old self would have made this cause for ongoing disdain and possibly depression. Now, I look up. Instead of telling myself that this is not the sky of the tropics (I used to focus relentlessly on what was missing, what I didn’t have), I search for colors in the Midwestern sky. At some point, I started playing a game of finding five colors in any sky. I almost always can. I very often find more. I told this to a color-blind person recently, who was instantly sparked by the idea and declared they would look for textures. (Brilliant! Now I’m noticing textures a lot more.) Even a simple blue sky isn’t monochromatic. There’s a lighter blue near the horizon line, and you may find a deeper shade as the eyes scan upward, and the deepest blue looking right up. White clouds aren’t just white. They’ve got edgy bits of shadow, with notes of violet, mauve, gray. (Get subtle and snobby, as if describing a fine wine.) Closer to the sun, a yellow-gold may gleam through. Even in a gray sky, shades of gray abound, and some of that gray turns out to be mauve or almost dark blue. I could go on. I cannot tell you how fun and fulfilling I find this absurd little game. I can barely express the benefits of looking into the sky. I know them viscerally, not semantically. Russ Hudson, my favorite Enneagram teacher (who gives huge emphasis to presence), sometimes uses the phrase Let it make its impressions on you. I love this phrase. And I love letting the sky make its impressions on me.  Photo of a blue sky with dramatic clouds. Some are dark,and others appear to glow with light. From Jake Weirick on Unsplash. WANT A BRIEF, RELATED AUDIO FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH? Remember that these five quick & easy alignment and focus processes come from Abraham-Hicks. Here is a lovely 10.5-minute video/audio to give you more ideas directly from Abraham about what it does for you to step outside and what you might do, experience, remember, feel, and allow out there. (If you bump into some of their jargon you don’t know, just ignore it and focus on what you instantly get and what appeals to you. There’s something in this for you if you’re drawn in. I find this to be a little gem of a talk.) WANT A LITTLE EXPERIMENT WITH LAW OF ATTRACTION? Of course, it’s nice to be out for the best skies at sunrise and sunset. Here’s a fun experiment to run: if you make a point of stepping outside or gazing out the window more than once in the day, and you’re cultivating a mindset of finding colors, you may notice you start receive tugs or impulses (and follow the impulses!) to look or head out when there’s more going on, when prime-time skies hit. That’s an easy to show yourself that what you give your attention to really does start echoing back to you. This way, you can play with LOA for free and at the risk of catching more amazing skies.  Photo of a pale sky with clouds lit yellow and purple from sunrise or sunset. From Jei Lee on Unsplash. NURTURE & REVEL IN YOUR LOVE FOR THE EARTH For those concerned about the environment, whether as a matter of course or more acutely in the current era, go love it up. Don’t just hate things happening that seem wrong and counterintuitive to you. Do spend time in nature. Remind yourself that beautiful places exist and that birds are flying around and animals are playing, grazing, gathering. The Earth, like your own amazing physical body, is constantly and actively self-repairing and bringing anything that’s off-kilter back into balance. Concern yourself less with what’s wrong (even if you’re right that it’s wrong) and more with healing and thriving mechanisms in progress. And take in and love and experience the beauty, the magic, the ongoing perfection. As Rachel Carson taught, cultivate a sense of wonder and teach and model that to younger human beings (who are almost always predisposed to meet you in the awe). People learn to give a damn better from a sense of what they love and cherish than what they fear and feel as spinning out of control. The Earth is still spinning properly in the perfect orbit. Give her your love. QUICK NOTE ABOUT THE SEDENTARY LIFE As with all of these processes for focus & alignment, stepping outside is great to do several times a day, as needed. You know your body wants to move. Your blood wants some support to circulate. Your screen-weary eyes want to stretch their gaze and take in something that isn’t digital. At the risk of repeating myself, follow every impulse to take even a super-quick pause to look out and up. Your whole body, nervous system, and breathing flow will recalibrate in a lovely way every time you do this. (Drink water while you’re at it!) You can find Abraham-Hicks process #1, Easy Existing Matches, right here. Find Abraham-Hicks process #2, Segment intending, right here. Find Abraham-Hicks process #3, Zoom in, zoom out, right here. Process #5 coming soon! And yes, I still love feedback. Love & blessings, Jaya
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for quick & easy FOCUS & ALIGNMENT  Photo of someone fine-tuning their work on a bicycle wheel. From Natalia Blauth on Unsplash. (Have you ever noticed you can follow the bold print in each post to get the gist of it for a quick read and to find where you may want to go in more deeply? Yup.) I’ve now offered 3 of 5 quick & easy processes (all now on my blog, all linked at the bottom of this writing) to help you choose your focus and come back to alignment (or to a better feeling state) when you find that you’re OFF. Here, I’m hitting the pause button in order to fine-tune what we’re already working with. I’ll come back around with processes 4 & 5 soon. Reminder of where this stuff originates: All of these user-friendly & effective processes come from Abraham-Hicks. If you want it from the horse’s mouth, you can search that name on YouTube and find a ton of free stuff. You can also pay for Abraham Now broadcasts to hear the latest conversations in these virtual international gatherings that happen most months anywhere from one to four times. Past broadcasts are available for purchase, too. I want to flag that for political support in the current reality in the US, both the November 9 and January 29 Abraham Now programs were especially rich with helpful content. Fine-tuning Zoom In, Zoom Out: In brief, this process involves checking out, when you feel bad, how zoomed in you are to a specific topic, or what level of detail you’re in. Noticing that you’re in the thorns, ZOOM OUT! Get away from snaggly details and pull back. Go general. Remind yourself of very general things you can tell yourself or know to be true that soften the whole topic (This too shall pass, I’ve felt this way before and it worked out okay, I don’t need to figure this all out—just need to take one step at a time). Whatever you’re creating or tending or having thoughts & feelings about, approach it or come back to it--ZOOM IN—when you feel good & aligned (capable, supported, calm, trusting, etc). Then the details don’t feel daunting! Great question someone sent: HOW? How do I zoom out when the zoom-in feels like quicksand? My response: By caring more about how you feel. (That, too, is a classic Abraham-Hicks phrase. CARE MORE ABOUT HOW YOU FEEL.) Then you'll catch a whiff of quicksandy stuff before it has so much momentum that it can only suck you in deeper deeper deeper. Everything gains momentum, so please catch things early. Care so much about how you feel that you tune in to the first whiff of feeling bad. Stop and check out what the mind is up to in that moment. You’ll probably find that it’s zoomed in on upsetting details that overwhelm you (stress you out, feel disturbing, …). From there, you have the possibility of choosing your mental focus, and these processes are designed for just that. You can consciously walk yourself to a focus that brings some relief and feels better. Zooming out will almost certainly do that for you. Another way to zoom out before the quicksand takes you is by being willing to interrupt lines of thinking that ego-mind wants to carry on with. The mind will grasp. It will insist on holding to these thought trains for various reasons. Any of these familiar?
Be willing to experiment with letting go fast of habitual thinking that feels bad (whether or not you identify why you typically cling to those thoughts). If you’d like to experiment with a new radical habit of interrupting habitual lines of thinking that feel bad, then you’ll also want new things to reach for to give the mind somewhere else to go. These tools are good ones. They provide very doable ways to focus the mind. I don’t think it’s actually hard to zoom out or to reach for any process in the moment you need one. A lot of the time, what feels hard is simply UNPRACTICED. Are piano scales hard or do they just require practice? I invite you to keep practicing zooming out, no matter when you catch yourself, no matter how deep in the quicksand you end up. Practice any of these tools you feel drawn to play with. Practice because you care about how you feel, you want to feel better, and you see the potential in these tools for helping you feel better more of the time. For some people (certainly for Enneagram heart types!), it helps to keep this in view: Be okay with the fact that your feeling body won’t catch up right away. The heart tends to lag behind the mind—no problem. Work with the mind without demanding that the heart come along swiftly. Your feeling state is always (always, always) affected by what you’re paying attention to. Change your mental focus, and your feelings will eventually follow. IT WON’T WORK IN THE OPPOSITE ORDER, so don’t wait to feel better to focus mentally on something else!  Close cropped view of a person in a shiny suit playing a Schimmel piano. From Dominik Scythe on Unsplash. Fine-tuning Segment Intending: Listening again to a recent broadcast from Abraham, I was reminded of two important things they stress about segment intending (process #2). For that one, you set very simple intentions for just the next thing you’re doing, the next little segment of your day. You’re not writing goals focused on what you want to accomplish (though those are fine too), but instead determining how you’d like to feel during that one bit. If I’m about to work on taxes, I’ll segment-intend all over that to set myself up for being relaxed, at ease, pleased with myself for taking care of business, and so on. (I’ll let your imagination fill in how many laptops may have flown though closed windows before I learned about this tool.) One major point of segment intending: I didn’t mention before that segment intending allows you to choose how you’re presenting yourself to the field of attraction. I love that phrasing. You attract more of what you bring in. Going in to do tax work with anxiety and frustration—hating the task already—means building momentum from there. The risk of flying laptops and shattered window panes increases. Presenting yourself already poised for a relaxed process to be moved through slowly and at ease probably means getting more done, feeling better about the whole thing, and maybe knowing when to quit. Use segment intending to refuel as you go: Segment intending also provides a means of refueling, says A-H. Another super-helpful metaphor. You’ve used a certain amount of energy up to now, and you’re about to rev up for the next activity (task, event, whatever). Are you fueled? The pause to tune in to how you’re feeling and choose consciously how you’d like to feel for the next thing refills your tank. You come back to presence, back to what you’re about & what you’re after. You line back up with Source energy.  Photo of two cats following a robotic vacuum cleaner. From YoonJae Baik on Unsplash. Plug in: Most important, segment intending, and all of these processes, plug you in to Source energy. Abraham has also been using the metaphor of plugging in the vacuum cleaner. If vacuuming stands for the things to get done in life, then you do need to make sure the machine is plugged in, or any amount of pushing the thing around isn’t going to accomplish any of it. (Okay, I did pick a bogus illustration of a robovac that doesn’t plug in, but … cats. To be fair, the robot cleaner does have to charge up first in a plugged-in charging station, so …) Please please please, don’t just propel yourself through the day in any feeling state, going from one thing to the next to get shit done. Live your life consciously. Be in a dance with consciousness. Choose your focus. Connect to what nourishes you all day every day. These process are fantastic ways to do that. Current climate affecting you? Let me throw in that many people in or connected to the US are very distressed these days about political doings and their impact on sentient beings & the Earth herself. If you let the media and the feeling states & preoccupations of those around you choose your focus for you, you know it’s not going to be pretty. I invite you to consciously align with Source. Find larger perspectives. Hold the vision of what you do want and give energy to that. Focus less on what’s horrible and leads you to predict future horrors. How will that get us where we want to be? (Answer: it will not.) Are you planning to feel bad for the next four years? Please don’t. I don’t wish that on anyone. You’re here now, and this is your life. Simply put, when you feel heavy, disturbed & distressed, fearful, angry, outraged—you’re out of alignment with Source energy (and you’re not having fun). Consider how different love feels from fear & dread. Live in love, take excellent care of yourself and your feeling states, and you’ll find where and how to do some good. (Focus on what’s wrong and what’s not as you want it, and your clouds will get darker and darker. You’ll be no good to anyone.) A very different process to help with political pain: Here’s a a tapping or EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) session on the topic of minding your state in the midst of the current political climate. NEW ANNOUNCEMENT: I’ll be doing EFT on Saturday mornings in February with anyone who shows up. These will all end up on my YouTube channel. Note that I have a specific playlist to support you with any stress based on political stuff. You can find Abraham-Hicks process #1, Easy Existing Matches, right here. Find Abraham-Hicks process #2, Segment intending, right here. Find Abraham-Hicks process #3, Zoom in, zoom out, right here. Process #4 coming soon! If you’re drawn to the first 3, please play with them! And keep the feedback coming. It’s part of what fuels me. Love & blessings, Jaya Process #2 of 5 for quick & easy focus & alignment Photo of a person sitting on a wood floor string a long thread of beads. From Natalia Blauth on Unsplash. You are aligned when you feel connected, serene, optimistic, excited, clear. In short, you’re aligned when you feel good. When you don’t feel good, you may want to reach for a tool that could make you feel better. This is how you mind your alignment. When you get up in the morning, you might reach for a tool that allows you to choose your own focus. How do you want to feel? These quick & easy processes I’m offering in a series of 5 come from Abraham-Hicks, where I’m getting most of my dynamic learning & input for feeling great about my evolving life these days! SEGMENT INTENDING This process has two steps, and the first is optional.
Multitasking version: If you can’t write your intentions down—maybe you’re driving or putting lunch together—speak your intentions out loud. Pen on paper is ideal, but segment intending is super helpful whether written or spoken. LET’S DEFINE SEGMENT Think of your day as a beaded necklace that you’re constructing or creating bead by bead as you move through the hours. Each bead represents the next activity. So a string of segments could look like this:
You can even treat sleep as a segment. Read the next paragraph if you could use a reminder about good ways to put yourself to bed. Segment-intend to declare how you want to drop in for sleep and how you’d like to feel waking up. Consider how this could change the tone of how you rest compared with what else you might carry into sleep. As you go to bed, do you evaluate yourself, your day, your success, your relationship? Or do you go over what’s not yet done and look anxiously ahead? How about clear, kind, restful intentions instead? Intend feeling satisfied, letting go, feeling held & supported (by the bed, by all of life, by what feels complete & lovely & good enough for this day)?  Photo of notebook, pen, and lit candle. From Mushaboom Studio on Unsplash. WHY INTEND FOR JUST ONE SEGMENT? This tool brings intentional living down to brass tacks (um, or necklace beads). All you’re doing is isolating one manageable next bit and defining how you want to feel in it. Then you can consciously aim for that. Intentions for just the next segment are powerful because they’re simple, their focus is narrow, they feel entirely doable. You’re gazing at and polishing the one next beautiful bead you’re about to string onto the necklace that is this wonderful day in progress. It’s unlikely you’ll want or need to set intentions for every single segment of a day. Use segment intending especially if you’re already noticing a wobble. Examples of wobbles you may feel acutely or get even a whiff of:
Note that you don’t have to feel even a little bit bad about what’s coming up to segment-intend. I zoom-met with a friend I adore the other day, and I used segment intending to imbibe up front how much I love being in their presence. That’s what I carried in with me, heart full and eyes already reflecting their brightness. Have you ever entered a meeting flustered or scattered or just barely catching up to yourself and this moment? I have. And when I segment-intend, I don’t do that. I come in clear, conscious, grounded. Ready or not, I am ready, and I’m willing. I’m present. Don’t you love getting more conscious in your dance with consciousness? More to the point—in this one next dance? Want to show up with sass, ease, attitude? You decide.  Photo of young person with dark skin, locs, and torn jeans dancing in the street pointing at the viewer. From Blake Cheek on Unsplash.
MAKE YOUR INTENTIONS ABOUT YOU AND, PRECISELY, HOW YOU WANT TO FEEL. It doesn’t really work to intend that things will happen a certain way, or that you’ll get a certain outcome. (Universe’s business.) It’s pointless to intend how others will show up, because you have no agency there. (Their business.) Just make intentions about how you want to feel. You can’t even control what you’ll do or how you’ll do it. So focus on calling in feeling states. Side note: when you’re minding your own alignment, you may find—may have already found!—that you call forth more of the good stuff that others have to bring. But just let that happen. Your work (your business) is to tend to your own clear focus and the feeling state that focus brings. You can leave the rest to life, to others, to Source, to Law of Attraction (to whatever you want to call it). EXAMPLES OF INTENTIONS FOR A SEGMENT Let’s say you’re about to write something up for work that you’ve been thinking about. So your list of intentions could look like this:
That’s it, folks. Then go on through the door into your next segment, and what’s there to meet you will be colored by all that you just set up, all that you’re consciously bringing with you. And as you string each segment of the day onto the whole, you end up with a thing of beauty and a sense of satisfaction. You can find process #1, Easy Existing Matches, right here. Process #3, on the Abraham-Hicks concept of zoom in, zoom out, is the next post on this blog. Reminder that no process you know about does any good unless you use it. I dare you to use one or more of these daily. (But really I want you to follow your curiosity about what’s possible to keep you aligned and feeling good as much as possible for your total well-being and fulfillment.) Love & blessings, Jaya Process #1 of 5 for quick & easy focus & alignment  Photo of red-and-white door on stone building with #1 on address placard. From Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash. (Have you ever noticed you can follow the bold print in these writings to get the gist of it for a quick read and to find where you may want to go in more deeply? Yup.) Here, you’ll find the first of 5 FOCUSING & ALIGNMENT PROCESSES I want to offer you precisely because
All of these processes come from Abraham-Hicks, where I’m getting most of my dynamic learning & input for feeling great about my evolving life these days! These tools are especially wonderful to use first thing in the morning, so you establish for yourself how you want to feel. Don’t let others, your inbox, the news, the commute—DON’T LET ANYTHING ESTABLISH YOUR FEELING STATE FOR YOU. Don’t let something external tell you what to focus on. Don’t even let your habitual thoughts or feelings co-opt what’s possible for this brand-new day. EASY EXISTING MATCHES (You might write EEM at the top of your page) This process has 3 easy steps, and the first 2 could take 30 seconds. Step #3 takes as long as you want to give it. Really drop in with it, whether you do that for 1 minute, 5, or until you have your own sense of completion. Most important, notice, when you’re ready to stop, that you feel different—you’ve shifted your feeling state. You’ve established yourself in feeling and believing you can feel HOW YOU WANT TO FEEL. Step 1. Simply notice how you feel. Let’s say you’re not so sure you feel fantastic today, or some dissatisfaction or hard feelings have already started to form. Perhaps they even grabbed you right when you woke up. You can feel the force of how they’re starting to call in other upsets & complaints. You can feel it in your body. Your mind has taken off without your go-ahead, and you can already feel the MOMENTUM of a line of thinking that’s self-defeating or just makes you feel bad. You know you could end up evaluating your whole life, right? And you’ll find it faulty or meh. (Funny how that works.) Step 2. Identify and write down how you want to feel. This could be about a particular topic or an upcoming event today; or, in general, just how you’d like to feel right now and on this day. Let’s say you establish that you want to feel like you love your life. You want to feel great.  Image of numbers 1-2-3 cropped from a photo by ISO10 on Unsplash. Step 3. List Easy Existing Matches
All you’re doing here is writing down things already fully present in your life that match the feeling you’re after. This allows you to call it up, know it’s already yours, remember it’s alive for you. This isn’t something you need to strain or strive for. It’s not out of reach or unknown. It’s already yours! Just list what’s right in reach that already fills the bill: easy existing matches. On a very recent gray & frigid morning, I created an EEM list for feeling great. It included things like this:
Note that I did NOT feel great when I began, and I did when I stopped. I also didn’t feel horrible when I began (though I would have used this process just the same if I had). I like to catch things early, before they build momentum. I love to sit down first thing in the day and do some processes to head right away toward how I want to feel. Bee tee dubs, one of my morning processes is free games on the New York Tiimes app. Which Abraham has never suggested, but they constantly remind us to judge nothing. Do what works. Follow what delights you. Mind your feeling state, because that’s minding your alignment. When you feel aligned, inspired thought comes in, right action grabs you, the thing to look up or reach for or attend to comes clearly into view. Try it, you’ll like it. And, hey, you know this already. You’re doing it already on some level. So try it more. Early and often. Abraham taught me: Care about how you feel. And when you feel bad, reach for what will make you feel better. Process #2, on Segment Intending from Abraham Hicks, is the next blog post! Love & blessings, Jaya Don’t just RENAME them & ignore what’s still there  Photo of galaxy from Arnaud Mariat on Unsplash Try this on: I am one with the Universe and all the workings of the cosmos, which include what is expressed in a single atom in the microcosm that is my own body. Thus, as you move around thinking more in terms of living in alignment and flow, this could most certainly, at a given moment, look like a parking space opening up for you in that right-place-right-time (seeming) magic. It could equally land you all the way across the parking lot—in which case you might play with the idea that there’s some gift for you in the journey. Could be a chance meeting with a person, animal, or vista. Or maybe the invitation and opportunity to drop speed and efficiency and simply get present to and value this moment of mundane reality: human being on planet Earth, walking across the expanse of a lot dotted with cars. Applying this REPLACE-DON’T-JUST-RENAME concept ubiquitously Where have you changed what you call something? Look at that thing and consider what else you’ve changed besides the name. Do you see and think and speak about it differently? Do you interact with it differently? Do you have a different experience of yourself, others, or life that goes with the new labeling? Is there anything you see to do to take this renaming further so you’re actually in a whole new framework and reality? Examples of typical renaming to jog your thinking …
If any of those resonate or make you think of something operative for you, check it out. Is it just a name change? Or are you revising the concept on many levels and feeling the better for it? Ah, the joy of getting ever more clear … Love & blessings, Jaya Here's a related writing: DROP REWARD & PUNISHMENT and set yourself free to live & love your life |
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