What You Believe Is What You Attract

A similar theme has emerged as I have read more and more about success principles, finding peace, and living a fulfilling life, (books by John Canfield, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Tulane Miedener, and others). The common theme is "where you place your focus is what you will attract to your life".

All matter is energy (or vibrations), and like energy attracts like energy. When you hold a certain belief about yourself or your circumstances, you will attract to you what you believe the outcome is inevitably going to be. In order to change or overcome this outcome, you must change your belief. To begin that change, at the moment of the lower energy (or negative thought), shift your focus to other higher energy, positive thoughts, regardless of its relevance to the negative thought. By immediately stopping the negative thought, you break the pattern and insert a new behavior- positive or higher energy thinking. This will begin the process of learning to think in higher energy patterns on a more consistent basis, elevating your overall life experience by attracting more positive people, circumstances, and emotions to you.

You can use this technique to change negative habits. For example, an alcoholic wishing to stop drinking typically focuses on how to change his desire for a drink. Where is his focus? On drinking. Will he be able to change with this thought process? Likely not. An alcoholic who wishes to stop drinking will have more success by shifting his focus away from drinking, and on to thoughts of love, forgiveness and strengths. These are higher energy thoughts and higher energy always overtakes lower energy.

Problems arise when we won't allow ourselves to have or experience negative thoughts without condemnation. When negative thoughts do creep in, as they will through the growth and healing process, we feel failure, and begin to focus on that feeling of failure, which in turn lowers our energy making it more likely we will attract exactly what we have been working to eliminate from our lives.

Shifting focus to positive energies and beliefs takes practice just as mastering any other skill does. It is important to realize that in the beginning of this process, you will have to frequently remind yourself to focus on positive beliefs and energies, and have conviction that your life will contain everything you desire just by focusing on success. Start acting as if positive things are coming to you. One way to do this is to start appreciating what you already have in your life, from freedom, food, safety, health and shelter, to eternal life, skills and abilities, intuition, love and relationships.

When you focus on being grateful for what you have, you realize that what you are most grateful for is usually not "things" but relationships, skills, safety, security, love and peace. This can be eye-opening, because many people in this country of abundance believe their happiness is based on having more, and the ability to acquire more. As we shift our thinking to appreciation, we realize how much we already have; we realize that it is less important to acquire "more" than to develp a greater apprecation for what we already have; we also start seeing how others could benefit from our excess by just providing for their basics (food, shelter, health). We realize how very little it costs to provide this but what an enormous reward it provides to our souls to meet someone else's needs.

It is so important to always remember that you are what you think. If you think that you are stuck in a deadend job- you will always attract dead-end jobs. If you believe that people will always try to take your wealth from you, you will attract problems that involve losing part of your wealth; if you believe that your marriage is doomed to fail, you will attract the negative aspects that lead to turmoil; if you believe there are no 'dateable' singles out there, you will only attract those you find 'undateable'. At the same time, if you focus on appreciating the positive in your life and see how that will enable you to attract what you want, those things will be attracted to you. You must believe your wants are going to be fulfilled and act as if you are already living that life. Dress the part, surround yourself with those you want to emulate, learn what needs to be learned, and remove negative beliefs, thoughts and energies from you mind. The life you want is in your mind!