I picked up a book I bought a while back and had only read the first few pages of. It was lesser known book on the law of attraction, but was pretty consistent with most of the more popular ones. The book laid out three steps to start.

1. Determine and write what it is you want?
2. Write down what you think that desire would bring you?
3. Imagine your life as if you already had it, and how you would feel.

I thought I would give the recommendations in the book a whirl. Like many people, as I wrote down my desires, it felt really in-congruent. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe I could achieve it, It was that what I thought these things would bring me, I knew they wouldn’t. It felt like a superficial exercise. This isn’t the first time I tried out the law of attraction, the secret, or whatever you want to call it. Even though it was a short lived exercise it reminded me of what has really worked for me to attract more of what I want into my life. The act of using my conscious mind to think, write, and imagine my desires has never worked for me, but there is something that does work for me.

Several years ago I started practicing mindfulness. One night as my mind was quiet, alert, and for the most part without thought, I started to feel the familiar sense of peace and stillness. I subtly focused on a feeling of satisfaction. I started to feel subtle background assurances that no matter what happened things would work out positively for me. They were kind of vague notions with tiny pieces of detail that I couldn’t recall after my meditation. It was just a sense of assurance. I think it was all in my own mind, not something from the outside. That was when I started to realize that there was more to me than just the thinking mind, and how I had come to identify myself in this world. Not long after this experience I decided to just surrender to the present moment, in every possible moment. This was to be a short term experiment. I remember in the beginning I would experience moments of panic, and even now I occasionally worry that I will miss some important deadline. The thing is I achieve more now than I ever have. I can’t tell you it wasn’t a coincidence, but just days after my “surrender experiment” I received a fantastic job offer from a company I had turned down several times. Since then things just seem to naturally unfold, from my work to the very part time life coaching practice. I do believe there is something to the law of attraction, but I believe the first steps are really:

• Instead of deciding consciously what you want, learn to quiet your mind and let it come to you.
• Learn to be grateful for whatever you have. (A consistent mindfulness practice will help with this for most people.)
• Accept that you are where you are, and that you couldn’t be anywhere else, because you aren’t. Start to move forward from there. (Credit: Peter Crone –  “What happened, happened, and couldn’t have happened any other way because it didn’t.”)

I don’t want to give you the idea that piles of money are going to roll into your lap, or you will just all the sudden become a superstar. It is just that mindfully quieting your mind and accepting what is, will help you let go of struggling and that will give way to right actions and results. You will still have to put in some work, but the work won’t seem so bad because your mind won’t be telling you how bad it is. The number one cause for failure is paying attention to and believing the thought box situated between your left and right ears. Quieting your mind and looking inside will move your life to the next level.

The law of attraction is a real thing, and you can attract more of what you want, but as Albert Einstein so brilliantly says, “We can’t solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” In other words if you believe you have a problem, you won’t find the solution at that level of thinking. You must first accept what is and look at it without the problem charged emotions. Just breathe!