by Lorelei Low | Jul 10, 2017 | Alignment with Values, Empowering and Freeing Choices, Gratitude, Living Abundantly, Mindset
On this date last year, after a light dinner while watching the surfers, I composed an earlier version of this post on a poolside lounge chair as the sun went down in San José del Cabo, Mexico! A few seats away, my husband was on a 90-minute overseas call. This setting illustrated my belief: that I can combine enjoying my life with serving my mission. A year later, I am overflowing with gratitude about how much of what I was trusting God for in hope and faith has actually been unfolding with supernatural grace! So let me please share a process that’s worked for me as I journal, pray about, implement what comes to me in that Quiet Time, and then thank God as I see the outcomes.
All that’s standing between you and what you desire is belief. That the power of belief is key to the outcomes you experience is borne out by scripture and by the myriad stories of motivational speakers. Wise teachers contend that we mostly get what we believe although we may not realize exactly what our beliefs are. Proverbs 23:7 warns us that as you think in your heart, so shall you be. And Abraham Lincoln put it like this: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
After discerning God’s will and making sure what you want aligns with it, the first step in putting the power of belief to work is to identify what you want—but not necessarily in minute detail; the essence of your goal is best, leaving room for the Holy Spirit to surprise you. For example, to be healthy was probably the goal of the poor, untouchable, hemorrhaging women who believed about Jesus, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured” (Mark 5:28). Indeed, Jesus felt the power going out of him when she surreptitiously touched the hem of his garment; and he told her and the crowd that her faith was the basis of her healing. His words probably gave her respectability as well.
I recently read a 1998 book called So, Why Aren’t You Rich? The Prosperity Secret of the Rich by Darel Rutherford. It helped me see that my beliefs about hard work were not as positive as I’d imagined. Quite the opposite, as I realized after examining the Green Monster dream I discussed in “Honoring Your Dreams Through Creative Expression,” I believed that making money came at an exorbitant emotional cost. I started to do the work described below to change my mindset once I became aware of how that buried thought was holding me back. And now I can attest to this: Replacing a mindset of lack and hardship with a mindset of plenty and abundance is likely to beneficially spill over into many areas of life, including not just finances but also time and energy!
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A simple project can illustrate how to go through a 7-Step Manifestation Process I’m grateful to have learned from my friend, Ericka Jackson James.
I invited anyone with a postponed organizational project to join a client, friends, and me on July 12th, a day we set aside for tackling our individual organizational challenges “together across the miles,” making it fun, productive, and easy to be motivated by sharing virtually, as we’re each in our own places. (See my post, How to Join a Virtual Organize-for-Fun Day.)
Using that project as an example of the 7-Step Manifestation Process:
- Want. The first step is to decide what you WANT—for example, to make organizational progress. Ask yourself: “Who would I need to be in order to meet my goal?” For the organizing project, I believe being prepared, realistic, and in a mindset of abundance will help most. It would help to state this in an affirming “I Am” statement. For example, “I am grateful for the abundance of my blessings and I’m willing to care for my things and share.”
- Hope. The next step is HOPE, so engage in possibilities thinking.
- Desire. After hope comes DESIRE, focusing on the essence of what you long for, such as certain piles to be eliminated and, by the end of the day, knowing where the stuff formerly in the piles now “lives” (whether in your home or off to charity or recycling).
- Decide. With your want, hope, and desire clarified, you commit and determine the project to be done. To achieve success, I’ve urged setting a reasonable goal to achieve in the time participants have available that day. BELIEF is easier if the goals seem attainable from the outset. Alternatively, if you’re willing to trust God and stretch your faith, you might even select a goal that seems humanly impossible, while believing that nothing is impossible for God.
- Believe. We’ll ground the BELIEF by engaging our imaginations about how the newly organized area will look or work and how we’ll feel about accomplishing the task. Selecting inspiring music, breaks, and rewards can enhance our success and make it all more fun. That’s why I had a Scavenger Hunt for participants the day of the Virtual Organizing-for-Fun Day, so we could engage our childlike spirits and make this work more like play.
- Exercise Faith. Taking a “before” photo and planning to take an “after” photo as well, we combined belief + action into FAITH. At this point, try to embrace with 100% certainty that your goals will be fulfilled. As a person of spiritual faith, this step typically involves saying a prayer for persistence, guidance, wisdom, and blessing along the way.
- Embody. Following through in faith with action, good systems, and/or spiritual guidance will allow you to organize in chunks and also practice good self-care by taking healthy breaks and nourishing yourself. You’ll see visual progress along the way, a reward in itself. You’ll be DOING what the person you described in the Step 1 “I Am” statement does! As you execute your plan, you’ll be embodying the MANIFESTATION of your belief: the results become visible. Congratulations will be well deserved!
Yes, adversity and challenges happen. Sometimes one person’s belief conflicts with someone else’s. We have lessons to learn and the journey has its twists, ups, and downs. But living with wisdom and belief is a shorter journey to realizing our goals and aligning with our sacred callings than letting life just happen to us.
I encourage you to put the power of belief to the test. Also please feel free to comment below or email me about areas where you find it most challenging to believe in positive outcomes.
by Lorelei Low | Apr 7, 2017 | Alignment with Values, Creative Expression, Encouragement and Inspiration, Life Stories, Transformational Breakthroughs, Unbound
Pondering Priorities and Piercing Perfectionism Turned the Tide
When I learned to sew, my mother instilled in me excessive concern about how each garment would look inside out. My seam ripper became the most used tool in my sewing kit. I’d rip and re-do a seam or a line of topstitching almost as often as it took to make the right side and wrong side perfect.
But this week I completed a 76” x 76” quilt and entered it into a show even though it was far from perfection. And I’m as happy with its imperfections as I am with how it’s re-ignited my passion for quilting, which had smoldered for a few years.
With this very time-consuming quilt, From Nora’s to the Crash Pad, I designed and sometimes cut or sewed in peaceful silence (part of my Reap As You Sew approach to spiritual quiltmaking). Because this was a LONG project, I also listened to some audiobooks while I did the more repetitive tasks (such as pressing yards of pre-washed fabrics, adding a slow decorative stitch over certain “ditches” between borders, and hand-stitching the binding and hanging sleeve). Among the audiobooks was The Road Back to You, a book about the Enneagram, a personality assessment tool I’ve benefitted from since 1989 and utilized extensively in my training as a spiritual director. The Enneagram dates back to the fourth century and is a spiritual tool as much as a psychological one. It sets forth nine personality types, with many, many variations and nuances that help you know your strengths, weaknesses, tendencies, and approaches to life. I am a No. 1, the Idealist or Perfectionist, so you see how this ties into the seam ripper!
What I love about the Enneagram is that it doesn’t pigeonhole me and leave me there. Rather, it makes me aware of how I typically respond to stress (I withdraw and become more like a No. 4, the Romantic, like Mary Magdalene) or to feeling secure (moving toward No. 7, the Enthusiast, like The Woman at the Well). It helps me understand how I challenge my husband or kids when I’m imposing unrealistic standards, being critical, or listening too much to my Inner Critic. Armed with awareness, I’m better able to get around my pitfalls, to recognize and renounce my demons.
Surprise 1: The Imperfect Attracted Me Most
From Nora’s to the Crash Pad began with a romantic dinner at Restaurant Nora when I accompanied my husband on a business trip to DC in 2015. We practically missed our dinner when our flight was delayed, but we were determined to go there even when we didn’t land until almost 9 pm. Nora’s had been our favorite splurge when we were dating in the early 80s, and my husband used to save up for visits there about once every other month. When we walked in now, decades later, the part of me who became a quilter about ten years into our marriage was thrilled to see the walls adorned with an impressive and varied collection of antique quilts.
Of all the quilts, the one opposite my seat was the one that inspired my newest quilt. After the diners who sat beneath it had left, I went up close to admire and photograph it. I was stunned to see how wonky it was: the decorative stitches you’d find on old crazy quilts were irregular. The seams were in odd places. The shapes weren’t uniform. The fabrics were inconsistent. Points of triangles were cut off. Straight lines were out of alignment. And there was embroidery in some places, not balanced by similar embroidery where it would be expected. I was charmed! I decided to make something like it for a bed quilt for our San Francisco apartment, which we call “the crash pad” since our principal residence is 110 miles north along the coast.
I’d learned over and over (but still tend to forget) how being perfectionistic can help me or hurt me. Perfectionism helps me when I remember to strive for excellence rather than unattainable perfection, and it’s served me well in academic and professional circles. But it hurts or hinders me when I procrastinate rather than doing a job that I fear won’t meet my standards. It’s awful when it gets in the way of loving acceptance and honoring other people’s approaches, when it harms my relationships. I’m sorry to say that it’s been the source of many a disagreement with my husband, who is not a perfectionist. (Fortunately, he’s let me train him about how best to load a dishwasher.) And it was hard for my kids, who I now know felt criticized and often not good enough, just as I had growing up with my parents’ high standards.
I’m no longer addicted, but I call myself a recovering perfectionist. With Unbound prayer ministry, I renounced the lies that live in No. 1 territory: that I’m not good enough; that I must do everything myself if I want it done right; that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing your very best; and so on. So I brought my recovering perfectionist self to the making of From Nora’s to the Crash Pad.
Surprise 2: Imperfect Beats Never Finished
Not having a pattern, I had to design and enlarge this quilt and I wanted to “fix” some of the original’s wonkiness, but I ended up with some wonkiness of my own! I appliquéd the center section together, thinking I’d cover all the mitered corners with eight radiating lines like the original had. So I didn’t worry about those miters being just so. Only later, I decided I wanted just four spokes, so some imperfect miters are left exposed. Not all my 90-degree angles are square. I got a new quilting machine with which to quilt this and didn’t have time to practice on a smaller, less important quilt first. So the quilting has many zigs or zags that wouldn’t be there on a perfect quilt. And I bought the wrong amount of backing fabric and had to choose something else from a small local offering, so the back is solid cream and it shows all the stops and starts and a little thread barf and even some blood from a cut finger. So what!? On the bed, who will care? Even hanging at the show, with the placement I got up high, the five-foot rule is automatic. No one can even see those imperfections without a giant stepladder! Had I held out for perfection, or wielded the seam ripper more than I did, this quilt might have lost not only its chances of completion in my lifetime, but the joy it gives me in the present!
Surprise 3: Meeting a Challenge with Excellence Highlights Priorities
Powering through a week of almost non-stop production toward the end of this project, I felt the love of quilting again. I was delighted that I’d traded in a sewing machine I didn’t like for one I now love – even though that meant admitting that I’d made a wrong decision when I bought the other machine ten years ago. You see, wrong decisions are a significant fear and embarrassment for Ones. I had to prioritize and not even try to please everyone else as I put my creativity ahead of service, which is also unusual for a One who tends to overwork and fall short in the self-nurture category. Creativity is, for me, a top form of self-nurturance! Even when I work late into the evening, I quilt with Spirit, go to bed happy, have sweet dreams, and wake up enthused.
I’m excited to be going to the opening reception for the quilt show tonight, sharing it with my husband who loves this quilt. I’m delighted to have re-discovered how expressing my creativity is not a luxury but a necessity in my life! The creative process allowed me to ponder the Enneagram once again, reconsidering both how and WHY I do what I do and what I might wish to do differently. I’ll bring its insights with me into my freedom, healing, and deliverance ministry.
If you’re interested in finding out about your Enneagram type to help you identify some of your penchants and to gain personal benefits from its wisdom, I recommend reading The Road Back to You or other Enneagram books. I’ve got a library of them, and each sheds more light on the illuminating subject of how we are. I’d also recommend Unbound ministry or 5 Keys to Freedom in Christ prayer ministry to help you break through your compulsions, fears, or bad habits, and to open you to greater creativity, a process which I describe in my eBook, Freedom from Hurts, Fears, and Unhealthy Habits.
Your comments are always welcome!
by Lorelei Low | Aug 27, 2014 | Alignment with Values, Overcoming Obstacles
© depositphotos.com/steveball, licensed by Reap As You Sew
The first time I heard the 1955 song, “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (written by Sy Miller and Jill Jackson) was in1990 during the Persian Gulf War, when the US and other countries launched Operation Desert Storm after Iraq invaded Kuwait. I’m not a good student of history, military operations, or MidEast politics, but I do remember how I felt with the notion of peace on earth beginning with each of us as individuals. I liked the idea because it took away some of the helplessness of being a citizen of a nation at war . . . or planning war . . . or debating decisions that affect war and peace. And here we are again, perhaps feeling helpless, or angry, or some other intense emotions because of what’s happening in the world or could happen soon.
How we deal with these emotions involves mind, heart, and spirit. When that’s our experience, I submit it’s a time to notice that a spiritual battle is also waging and to embrace healing and soulful creativity.
In creativity, we have the opportunity for mind, heart and spirit to coalesce, to heal and center us by employing varied elements, expression, and processes that often take us to meaningfully depths. Visual art, the performance art of movement, music, tactile arts using ceramics or textiles, music, poetry—follow your own artistic inclinations as we make the Labor Day transition to the Fall, setting aside some time, even just a few minutes now and then, allowing your creativity to rise, to heal, to produce joy, to mourn, to express, led by your mind, your heart, and your spirit, and if you allow it, by the Spirit of God. On Labor Day and after, I will do that!
Starting tomorrow, I’ll be attending the 43rd annual Southern California Renewal Communities Convention at the Anaheim Convention Center with my spiritual brothers and sisters. We’ll spend four days pursuing a ministry track called UNBOUND. Scripturally-based, UNBOUND’s mission is to love each person as God loves us and to serve God as instruments to set God’s people free in Jesus’s name. UNBOUND disciples of Christ are waging a spiritual battle, and I believe it is just as important, if not more important, than what’s happening in the MidEast. Darkness and evil are the oppressors; and I pray for Light (which has already won the victory on the cross) to shine forth. As for letting peace begin with me, I pray that I may be a channel of God’s peace and a sign of God’s love. Let peace begin with me in my heart, and with you in your heart, and in all of our hearts together. Are you with me? Amen!
P.S. By the way, this year’s convention theme is “You are the Light of the World.” I only noticed that after I wrote this!
Note: This was originally written for my Heart-to-Heart.net blog but I posted it here “accidentally” and then decided to leave it. Sorry for the duplication if you subscribe to both.
