Willing to Experiment

What?

What a strange notion. It never crossed my mind that life was an experiment. For me it was almost set in concrete. What could I do about what life threw at me. It seemed as if I had drawn the short straw, as it were, and now had to live with the consequences. I’m not sure if my mother ever said this but it sure sounds like her, “You made your bed, dear, now lie in it!”

I don’t know if you’re seeing this but boy did I have some kind of victim mentality going. Life just wasn’t fair. How come others seemed to get ahead and I couldn’t? It all felt so hopeless. I remember having some idealistic dreams about how I would make a difference in the world but all that seemed to be happening was that I was getting further and further mired in debt and unhappiness.

What was the secret to life? I’m not even sure that that question crossed my mind. Because I’m pretty sure with what I know now that it would have put me in a position of finding some answers.

Help

And help came. I suddenly “heard” about a Loving Relationships Training being held in Melbourne. One sentence from that weekend stayed with me, “Blame is  always off the track.” That became a life-changing moment and set me on a trajectory of finding answers. I picked up Catherine Ponder’s book The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity. I hadn’t known there were universal laws that govern our lives. That was a novel concept to me. I began to experiment.

What if I took what Catherine Ponder was writing as true. She wrote, “There is gold dust in the air for you.” I liked the sound of that.  Although skeptical that I would see any of that gold dust I started to do the things she was writing about.

New Thoughts

I filled up notebooks with denials and affirmations or as one of my teachers now likes to call them “releases and assertions.” I had to release the ides of lack and  limitation which so dominated my life. There were all sorts of things I believed I couldn’t do because I couldn’t afford to. That seems to make sense when you’re in  debt as I was, seriously struggling to keep my head above water.

There is no lack or limitation anywhere in my life. I now live in abundance. All my needs and desires are met before I even ask.

As I write that now it is true for me but when I started it seemed like some distant unattainable dream. I was willing though to keep going. The prospect that it might  work was more appealing to me than continuing to live the way I had been.

New Practices

I found that over time the constant repetition of the affirmations that I was finding in Catherine Ponder’s books made a difference. I was willing, too, to take on the practices she was writing about.

I began a practice of forgiveness. In one class a central concept was “there is nothing and nobody against me therefore everything must be for me.” Yeah right. It sure didn’t look like that at first but again as I worked on forgiving everybody and everything in my life that statement became true for me.

Those two practices, experiments if you like, have made the biggest difference in my life.

The Golden Key

You may know about this little Unity booklet published a good many years ago written by Emmet Fox and called The Golden Key. Basically it says that whenever you have a difficult situation, a problem to solve, stop thinking about it and think about God instead.

And it doesn’t matter what your idea of God is, it works. Another experiment.

And as one of my teachers used to say, “If you can tell me what you want, I can show you how to get it.”