Life is Supposed to Feel Good

For as long as I could remember, I’ve felt bad about life. It started in childhood with physical abuse by a parent. Later, I had the bad luck to crossed paths with two sexual predators resulting in molestation and rape. I learned, pretty early on, to console myself with food so by my teen years I was overweight. When I became old enough to work, I got a job which introduced me to another way to self medicate myself; spending money. By the time I was twenty-five, I had declared bankruptcy twice.

On the surface it would seem that feeling bad about life in general and myself in particular was justified. After all, if I hadn’t suffered abuse as a child or had been taken advantage of by sexual predators or hadn’t been ridiculed or didn’t get into fights with people or had been more responsible with money then my life wouldn’t be in such a state of disrepair. It might even be downright perfect and I would have nothing to feel bad about. Right?

To try to help myself in a constructive way, I read a lot of self help books. It was my hope that the solution to ending my pain would be found amongst the motivational quotes and positive affirmations. They didn’t work. I would feel good for a little while but then something negative would happen and soon I would find myself back in the pit of despair. In hindsight, I realized that the reason none of those self help books worked wasn’t because they were ineffectual – although there is quite a bit of sugar coated crap out there – but because through the living of life, my interactions with other people and society at large, I had come to believe that life was supposed to be painful.

So because I held this belief, none of that self help motivational stuff would ever work. All I was doing was putting a band-aid on a wound that needed stitches. Worse, each failure to “get better” made me feel even more horrible about myself until one day I finally came to the conclusion that I had failed at life. I believed that I wasn’t supposed to be happy because somewhere along the line I had done something so horrible that doomed me to be miserable until the day I died.

I became very, very depressed. At one point it felt like I was suffering from manic depression because sometimes I would feel crazy high with energy and at other times I would feel as though I had fallen into the abyss of loneliness, fear and meaninglessness. Those were the times when I contemplated suicide. I figured that if this is all that life had to offer me then there was absolutely no point in continuing on.

Lucky for me I was too cowardly to actually follow through on those thoughts. In addition to that, my higher self was pretty determined that I would see this life through to the natural end because in those dark hours something would happen that would make me think there was hope yet. That hope helped me push through and keep trying to get better.

Fast forward to December 2009. A new year is quickly approaching and I still have not achieved any of the goals I set out for myself on January 1, 2009 or any other year before that. Normally I’d be beating myself up about it. I’d be calling myself all sorts of nasty names like, “Loser”, “Lazy” or “Failure”. I would probably then go to some personal development blogs online, read a few posts to get myself in the mood and then scratch out my “Plans for Improvement in 2010″. Because 2010 is finally going to be the year I get it right! Yeah!

Am I doing any of that? No. Have I given up? No. Have I found the secret to life? Well, I suppose you could call it that. I prefer to think of it as having finally come to my senses.

You see, a week and a half ago I got so frustrated about the condition of my life; more frustrated than I have ever been. I was tired of being “in this place” but it seemed no matter what I did I couldn’t leave. Finally, I sat down at my computer and typed out – in hysterical aggravation – all the things I wanted in my life and then sat back and demanded that the universe give them to me. (Please feel free to LOL. I won’t be offended.)

Instead, my higher self led me to Spirit Library where I came upon the Teachings of Abraham-Hicks. For those of you who don’t know, Abraham-Hicks is the combined name of a group of non-physical beings who call themselves Abraham and the medium Esther Hicks who channels them. The duo speak at length about the Law of Attraction.

Now I know many of you have probably heard about the Law of Attraction through the book and DVD called The Secret. Others may have brushed up against it through self help gurus looking to capitalize on the latest metaphysical fad. Well, the Teachings of Abraham are the source material for all of that and what I have learned from watching the videos (at Spirit Library and YouTube) is that if you really want to know the truth about the Law of Attraction then you have to learn about it straight from the horse’s mouth. Like the childhood game of Telephone, when a message gets passed from person to person, the nature of it changes according to how the person hearing it interprets what’s being said. In order to understand what those gurus are talking about, you have to watch Abraham-Hicks.

There are many things about these teachings that I want to talk about in-depth which will have to wait for future postings but the basic tenets of the Teachings of Abraham are:

1. You are Source Energy experiencing physical life
2. You are the creator of your individual universe
3. Energy (or Vibration as Abraham calls it) attracts like Energy

The first one I knew and accepted about a year or two ago. The second one I knew but couldn’t accept because I didn’t understand why I would create a life as bad as mine. The last one I had heard before from other people but didn’t understand exactly how it worked. After watching the videos, listening to the audio recordings on their website and reading the articles they have written, I finally get all of it except for the third one. I understand it but I’m still a little shaky on why it works that way.

Anyway, there are two things I’ve learned so far from my experience with the Teachings of Abraham that has caused a 180 degree shift in my mindset. Actually, I’m at about 120 degrees but steadily moving in a good direction. First, I learned that life is supposed to feel good. Second, nothing outside of myself has the power to make me feel good or bad about life. It’s an inside job.

Source Energy (or God or Allah or Zeus or whatever your understanding of the universe is) has a baseline vibration that never changes. Because we are Source Energy in a physical body we resonate with this baseline and call it many things: Wellbeing, Love, Joy, Happiness. This is our default setting. This is how we are supposed to feel all the time. When we don’t feel this vibration it means we are out of sync with Source Energy. Something is wrong and 99.999% of the time this wrongness indicates a problem with our thoughts.

Which brings me to the second lesson. Nothing outside of ourselves has the power to make us feel good or bad. Everything we feel is the result of what we think about what is happening around us. Our happiness and our misery begins and ends with what is going on between our ears. A simple example of this is food. Let’s take an apple. Some people love apples and some people hate them. In either case, the apple doesn’t change only the person looking at it does.

It’s the same principle I applied when thinking about my life. By understanding and accepting that life is supposed to feel good, I quickly realized that I had turned all of the bad experiences I had in life as well as the mistakes that I had made into a baseball bat which I constantly used to beat myself up in order to make sure I felt appropriately bad about them. And I say “appropriately” because more often than not, the reason I felt bad about things that happened was because I listened to other people who said I was supposed to feel bad about them.

When I realized the truth, that I was basing my judgments about my life on what other people said and thought about it, I also realized that I didn’t have to accept their viewpoint which then lead to the realization of something I’ve known my entire life. Life is meant to be lived and enjoyed. Our experiences are nothing more than life lessons that help us understand ourselves and the world in which we incarnated better. Those experiences also help us recognize the things we do not want which, in turn, inspire us to create the things we do.

These two simple lessons have done for me in ten days what I have been trying to do since I was a teenager. Heal, forgive and move on. I’m not saying I’m completely cured but I’m much farther along than I have ever been.

Now when I think about my goals for 2010 I am no longer driven by the need to have an epic win in order to overcome the failure I’ve had in life. Mostly, my focus is on growing as a person and seeing just how much I can expand in the absence of self judgment and self abuse. I’m curious about the Law of Attraction and I’m eager to see if it really works so I will be exploring it.

One of my goals is the same as it was last year which is to create a profitable home based business that supports me and the lifestyle I want. I’ve learned a lot over the last year and have met some amazing people who have helped me get on my feet and in the right direction. However, instead of trying to force things which only seems to frustrate me and slow things down, I’m going to try a different tactic and work on allowing success to come to me. Abraham-Hicks calls it The Art of Allowing. It is the releasing of resistance and allowing your blessings to flow to you. More on that later.

To help me with my financial goals as well as get a better understanding of how Law of Attraction fits in with that, I purchased their book, “Money and the Law of Attraction.” So far it’s really good. One of my clients sent me Ben Settle’s book, “The Copywriter’s Crib Sheet” which I feel will help me become a better writer so I can charge the fees that I want. In addition, things are happening now that seem small but I feel intuitively will have greater meaning for me down the road. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

All in all 2010 will see me enjoying the journey rather than sprinting towards the destination like I have in the past. What about you? What has 2009 taught you that has you looking at the upcoming year a little differently? Or are you continuing to pursue your goals with the same mindset?

(photo credit: photos8.com)

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3 Responses to “Life is Supposed to Feel Good”

1. The Secret to Getting Out of Hell | Arwen Taylor says:

   January 15, 2010 at 5:28 am

   [...] maybe you have put yourself in jail. Then take steps to let yourself out. As I’ve noted before, life is supposed to feel good and it is much too short to spend suffering over a past you can’t change [...]
2. lazygirl says:

   January 30, 2010 at 11:48 pm

   First of all, I’m really sorry about what happened in your childhood.

   My childhood wasn’t too great either. Well, actually it was wonderful until my mom passed away when I was 5. After that, it was a series of bad stepmothers. One of whom made me run away from home briefly and also beat my sister till she bled.

   So I had a lot of anger growing up and a lot of hate. It’s only in becoming an adult that I’ve slowly started to see there is more to life than I ever imagined. One of the things I keep telling myself is that there are more good people in the world than bad. But the bad might make themselves known or heard more.

   Thanks for the post and take care!

   P.S: I love Abraham Hicks!
3. ArwenTaylor says:

   January 31, 2010 at 2:42 pm

   Hi Lazy Girl (I feel so bad typing that, LOL)

   Thanks for stopping by and for the empathy. I’m sorry to that you had a poor childhood experience too. Sometimes I think we have to run into the bad in order to recognize the good when we come across it.

   I do believe that there are more good people in the world than there are bad. It’s just that bad people have better press agents because they dominate the news channels and newspapers. Maybe one day highlighting the good in the world will become a priority.

   Anyway, thanks again for stopping by. I look forward to talking with you more about Abraham Hicks and whatever else manifests itself on this blog. Haha.