Another great question was emailed to me: Why is it so hard to be open to good?….wondering what disaster will greet us when we open our email or turn on the news or get a phone call from someone we haven’t heard from in a while…..it’s a very human habit to “awfulize” or catastrophize”……but it’s a human creation, which means it’s temporary AND we can change our thought or perception…..with a lot of practice.

Life will happen, bad things will happen, the waves will come, but worrying about things before they happen helps no one and nothing. It’s a coping or protective mechanism: if I think the worst, I won’t be so upset when it happens. And, if something good happens instead, I will be especially relieved or happy.

When we practice being aligned with our divine nature, we build our reservoir of trust and good feeling. Then we can remember more easily, based on past evidence, that we actually do weather anything that comes our way…seemingly impossible things to get through. Since everything is energy and energy is never static, everything, every difficult situation will change, eventually…..every feeling will eventually morph into another feeling.

Awfulizing or thinking the worst is a version of “monkey mind” where our mind goes off chattering in a million directions….and it’s a practice to stay focused on what we want, not what we don’t want. This is where mantras and affirmations come in…not that the words in and of themselves do anything, but over time, when we are willing to repeat the words with the intent of moving toward the feeling the words represent (All is Well, Everything is Already Taken Care Of Perfectly, I Am Taken Care of Completely, I Cannot be Separate from the Universe) they redirect our mind to what we do want (resilience), not what we don’t want (disaster).

Also, every time we are willing to say the words of what we would like our experience to be, we are laying in a gossamer wing of good feeling….lay in enough gossamer wings (that we can’t feel as we are laying them in, as they are gossamer) and we will reach critical mass, the 51% and all of a sudden we will actually FEEL, All is Well! No matter what it looks like in the moment.

For years, my mantra has been, I’m all taken care of. Everything is already done perfectly, better than I can imagine. Over and over and over, sometimes hundreds of times a day when I’m really fearful. Eventually, we are moved to the feeling of trust, even before we see the result. We trust, we believe before we see, because we have past proof. This is one advantage of getting older: we have a lot of history that we truly are taken care of, in seemingly impossible situations. Everything changes. Energy always moves.

It’s practice, just like knitting, teaching, writing, nursing, building….whatever you are good at, took practice and time. This is just another practice. We have our whole lifetime to practice. That is what a lifetime is for.  Enjoy the adventure!