Follow Your Passion, Find Your Power: Everything You Need to Know about the Law of Attraction

ISBN-13: 9781571746474

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing Company - Inc.

Publication Date: 06-01-2011

Pages: 256

Product Dimensions: 8.30(w) x 5.60(h) x 0.68(d)

Bob Doyle is the author of Follow Your Passion, Find Your Power. Marci Shimoff is the author of Happy for No Reason.

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FOLLOW YOUR PASSION, FIND YOUR POWER

Everything You Need to Know About the Law of Attraction

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

Introduction to the Law of Attraction and Resistance

How the Law of Attraction Came Into My Life

I want to clarify right away that I'm not a physicist or any other kind of formally trained scientist. Nor does one need to be to utilize Law of Attraction principles. While I ground virtually everything I teach in science, I do not play the role of a quantum physicist because I have found that for the most part, people's eyes begin to glaze over when my explanations of the Law of Attraction become too complicated. After all, if you felt you needed a mathematics degree to be able to create your life by design, the entire process would be too daunting to take on in the first place.

A basic understanding of the physics of the Law of Attraction is essential to fully integrating many of the ideas discussed in this book. I believe you'll find most of the ideas to be utterly fascinating rather than overwhelming, and my hope is that you will find this part of the education to be as fun and inspiring as I do.

When I began investigating the whole idea of "creating reality" (as I called it when I first began exploring the concept in the early 1990s), I was absolutely turned on by the idea that we have more control over our experience of reality than we as humans are generally aware of.

I will never forget the fateful evening of December 26, 1990 when a friend of mine and I were marveling over the technical wonders of a special "holographic" paper wrapped around a pencil we picked up at a convenience store. Depending on how light hit it, a truly unbelievable array of colors would shoot forth from the paper in three dimensions. It looked as if it were lit electronically somehow from the inside. I remember truly marveling that science had created such an amazing light show that only a decade before would have cost literally thousands of dollars to create, and yet now was available for pennies on stickers, notebooks, and countless other trinkets one could pick up at any gas station.

It was while I was in this mindset of "anything is possible" that I received what I can only call a "download" from the Universe, an ah-ha moment to beat all ah-ha moments: Everything Is Energy.

Again, I've never received any kind of formal scientific training aside from what I learned in high school. But what I received in that moment was a knowing. I could clearly see the energetic nature of the Universe and how everything in the Universe is connected and has influence over everything else—even if we can't detect it with the five senses we've been trained to acknowledge.

I was so affected by the information that came to me at that moment that I spent the next twelve years of my life trying to make enough sense of it to actually do something with it. In that time I read several books, but most of my work was inner work. I learned to meditate. I studied hypnosis. I became totally fascinated with quantum physics, Energy, and the power of the mind.

With all that study came a strong intellectual understanding that actually creating life by design was all somehow truly possible, and that people were doing it. However, a very big piece of the puzzle was still missing for me. Although I read several books that were scientific in nature, there were some dots that weren't connecting for me. I realized that although understanding on a conscious and intellectual level that "anything is possible" was a good start, there was another level of understanding and believing that I was going to need in order fully integrate the idea that I could consciously create my reality into my worldview.

My breakthrough finally came in October of 2002. I had quit my corporate job in January of that year because it was literally killing me to go there day after day and feel absolutely no sense of myself or my value in what I was doing. And although the money was good, I had still managed to accumulate roughly sixty thousand dollars in debt. No matter how many raises I got (and I was making just under one hundred thousand dollars a year when I quit), my financial situation continued to decline.

More important than my financial situation was this feeling that my life was literally being drained from me. Like most people, I wanted to have a career that I was passionate about and in which I could express myself fully and creatively. Sitting in a windowless office working on human resources software did not afford me that opportunity, and finally the day came that in spite of my personal economic crisis, I simply had to walk away from being an employee.

My plan was to fully involve myself in teaching people to create their realities using all the information I'd been researching for over a decade. The only problem was that I wasn't an actual living example of what I was teaching. Still, I forged ahead. I created audio programs on the subject, and tried (mostly in vain) to book myself at hotels to speak and sell CDs and tapes—because that's what I believe I had to do to be a part of the self-help industry.

I studied marketing like my life depended on it (which I believed it did), and tried so hard to make sales and convince people that I knew what I was talking about. At that point, I didn't feel out of integrity because I truly believed everything I was teaching. But the truth was that there was something I wasn't getting.

No matter how hard I worked, no matter how much new information about marketing I learned, and no matter how good my intentions were, nothing was changing for me—except that my money problems continued to increase.

My wife and I reached a breaking point when our financial woes forced her to return to work. This was a major blow to my ego, as it had taken me many years to convince her to quit the job that was making her so miserable. After all, my corporate job was paying well enough (I was great at ignoring the truth about our financial situation), and my wife finally resigned from her position so she could stay home with our young children and be a full-time mother.

Because I'd made such a big deal about how we could afford for her to quit her job, my wife's return to work was a major wake-up call for me. I suddenly became clear that all this "work" I was doing wasn't getting me anywhere. All this trying to "figure out what was wrong" wasn't producing any answers. I finally decided to step back and become a true student of my own teaching.

That meant giving the whole thing up to a much more intelligent power.

Much of what I'd learned was that if you were clear about your vision and held it, the Universe would provide you with the answers and resources you needed to move forward. Those answers came in the form of something called intuition. For the nine months after I left my job, the voice of my intuition was being drowned out by the screaming of my ego and intellect, and it was time to quiet the noise and listen to what was being sent to me.

My new strategy became simply to get very clear on what I wanted (a career I was passionate about); being aware of what was showing up in my life; and taking definitive action at every step, regardless of whether it made logical sense or not. Truth be told, that is absolutely all you need to know about making the Law of Attraction work in your life. What makes it more difficult than it seems is the Energy that's running deep within us that we don't even know about. Learning about that Energy was the key to my eventual success.

To summarize what happened to me over the coming weeks, I'll simply say that I began to pay attention to things that I might have overlooked as trivial or irrelevant to my goals in the past. Conversations with new people gave rise to opportunities to explore various resources that I would never have found if I'd kept looking to my intellect for all the answers. A series of chance meetings eventually led me to discover a book called A Happy Pocket Full of Money by David Cameron Gikandi.

This book is what finally turned on the lights for me by clarifying in new ways several of the principles I'd already learned. The most important distinction I learned was just how powerful my belief system was, specifically my limiting beliefs about money and success. Gikandi's book explains the physics of our thoughts in such a way that I finally understood that thoughts are not just dormant ideas floating around somewhere in our brain, but that—like everything else in the Universe—they are real Energy, and thus have a real effect on my own experience of reality!

What were my limiting beliefs? Growing up in a single-parent home, the son of a school teacher who did not like her job, my family constantly experienced a lack of money. I learned that money was hard to come by, debt was always present, and in the end, it didn't matter whether you enjoyed what you did to earn money or not. You simply had to do what it took to bring in money.

When I could clearly see that these beliefs had run over the course of my life, it was easy for me to understand why all my attempts at generating revenue through businesses of my own, or through other means, always resulted in disappointment. My belief system simply didn't support my having financial success!

This revelation was a huge breakthrough for me. In that moment, I realized that my number one priority was to go to work on my beliefs, and that instead of filling my head and emotional state with fear and worry about money, I needed to find ways to saturate myself in feelings of abundance to the best of my ability. I understood at that time that it didn't matter how much I consciously desired a different situation; if my belief system wasn't congruent with that success, it simply was impossible for me to experience it. You'll learn more specifically why that is as we explore the concept of resistance and how the Law of Attraction really works.

If you watched The Secret, you learned about Vision Boards. These can take many forms, but essentially they are something of a visual collage of the things that you want to attract into your life. I'll share more details on vision boards as well as other techniques later, but this is a technique I began using right away. Because I spend so much time at my computer, I decided to use my computer's background wallpaper as my vision board. I began by taking a screenshot of my online banking statement. Then, in an image editing program, I changed all the numbers (which were pathetically low at the time) to very large numbers, unlike any I'd ever seen in my bank account. At first, of course, these numbers seemed unrealistic and way too huge to ever come true. However, after days of looking at these new numbers, I stopped reacting in such a dubious way. The numbers became the norm in my mind.

What I had done was stretch my energetic comfort zone around my bank account. As you'll learn, this is essential if you wish to significantly change your financial situation for the better.

So did money just magically appear in my bank account because I did this exercise? Of course not. What did happen was that I was provided with more and more creative inspiration about actions to take that would result in generating money. By now I'd learned not to judge these ideas, but to immediately move into what I was inspired to do. In my case, the inspiration was to put together an online program where I would share what I was learning. I called the program Wealth Beyond Reason, and its creation marked the beginning of a whole new life for me.

Another thing I did was absolutely key. It's something I'll be reiterating often. Rather than enter the online world of personal development with the mindset that "one day I'll be successful at this" or "eventually I'll be as effective as so-and-so who's already doing it," I made a commitment to myself to step powerfully into already being who I aspired to be. There is a huge difference from an energetic point of view (what you're "putting out there") between "wanting" to be something and "already being it."

I can't go too much further in my story without going into a more in-depth explanation of the energetic nature of this Universe we live in and providing what I believe to be the most accurate definition and explanation of how the Law of Attraction really works, so let's get into that right now.

The Truth About the Law of Attraction

Probably one of the biggest misconceptions about the Law of Attraction is that it's some kind of new personal development technique. Because of the success of The Secret and the subsequent influx of programs purporting to teach the Law of Attraction, many people started to view the Law of Attraction as some kind of "trick" or technique. This creates a mindset that the Law of Attraction can work or not work depending on whether or not one "does it right."

The whole notion that the Law of Attraction is something one "does" or "activates" is at the core of the misunderstanding that causes people to give up utilizing the principle to shape their lives.

Let's get this very clear: The Law of Attraction is not a tool or technique, and it is not all about "getting stuff." The Law of Attraction explains the behavior of Energy. It's a much bigger concept than simply how we as human beings can shape our experience of reality.

Remember, everything is Energy. This is something that science tells us for certain. Everything in our Universe, tangible or not, is composed of Energy in various forms, vibrating at various frequencies.

What we experience as physical reality, for example, is the result of our interpretation of Energy through our senses. As humans, we experience things as "physical" if they fall into a specific range of frequencies. At higher frequencies, things become less "visible" to us. Thoughts, for example, vibrate at a much higher frequency than does a chair; thoughts are not visible to the eye. Nonetheless, they obviously exist.

To use another example, there are colors in the spectrum of all possible colors that our eyes cannot see, but that can be seen by a snake. Dogs can hear frequencies of sound (also Energy) that we cannot hear. Those frequencies simply vibrate at a frequency that is out in our range.

As energetic beings, the Energy that makes up who we are is always vibrating at some frequency or series of frequencies. We call this our "vibration."

The most important concept that we need to understand as human beings attempting to work with these principles is something called resonance. If vibrational frequencies are in resonance, they attract. The opposite of resonance is dissonance. If vibrational frequencies are dissonant, they repel.

This is where I have a problem with the "like attracts like" definition of the Law of Attraction. While this can be the case sometimes, it is not the definition of the Law of Attraction, and certainly doesn't explain the behavior of Energy across the board. For example, many will be quick to point out that it is opposite polarities of a magnet that actually attract. And what about Mr. and Mrs. Jones who are clearly not at all alike, and yet are very much in love and most definitely attracted to each other?

You see, it's not about vibrational frequencies being the same. What determines whether the attraction process takes place is whether or not there is resonance.

You may have heard someone say that they resonate with a person, or an idea, or a piece of music. There is a vibrational harmony that takes place on an invisible level of Energy, and it results in an emotional state. For example, if you resonate with a piece of music, your emotional state will shift in some way that keeps you listening to it, wanting more, or simply enjoying it. This doesn't necessarily mean that the feelings you have are always positive. You may hear a sad piece of music and still resonate with it; your emotional state shifts accordingly.

Dissonance works differently. If you hear music that you absolutely can't listen to for whatever reason, it is because there is energetic dissonance. No attraction takes place, and in fact you experience a literal repulsion to the music.

Understanding resonance and dissonance is absolutely key to working intentionally with the Law of Attraction because you want to be absolutely sure that you are in vibrational resonance with what you're trying to attract. So although the scope of the Law of Attraction goes way beyond how it affects the human experience, the aspect of this law that we need to understand in terms of creating our lives by design is this:

We attract into our experience those things with which we are in vibrational resonance.

I've previously mentioned the fallacy that the Law of Attraction is something that you "activate" or "turn on." The Law of Attraction is always on, and is always responding to your energetic vibration, bringing you more of the things with which you are in vibrational resonance. It doesn't matter whether you're consciously trying to attract something or not. If you're in resonance with it, you are in the process of attracting it. Most people are attracting by default.

It's also important to fully understand the role of our emotions when working with the Law of Attraction. They are the very force that determines our vibration and tells us to a great extent what our vibrational state is in a given moment.

Law of Attraction teachers are often criticized by people who challenge the idea that we are attracting all parts of our experience by pointing to situations in the world where they claim that the person or people involved could not have possibly attracted said situation. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, birth defects, and the like are all pointed at as evidence that we do not attract everything into our experience and that some things just happen without explanation.

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Excerpted from FOLLOW YOUR PASSION, FIND YOUR POWER by BOB DOYLE. Copyright © 2011 Bob Doyle. Excerpted by permission of Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword Marci Shimoff vii

Introduction xi

Chapter 1 Introduction to the Law of Attraction and Resistance 1

Chapter 2 What Is Your Vision? 29

Chapter 3 We Truly Get to Choose 37

Chapter 4 Release Techniques 57

Chapter 5 Visualization 83

Chapter 6 The Answers to the Questions You Will Have 131

Understand That You Deserve It 137

Your Desires Are Already Fulfilled 148

Attracting Specific Things 152

Attraction Versus Creation 169

Are You Feeling Stuck? 173

Intuitions and "Signs" of Delivery 182

The Law of Attraction, Science, and Religion 199

When Things Seem to Fall Apart 217

Unimaginable Optimism 224

Recommended Resources 229