Life Is A Playground

I've been drawn lately to reading books about dead people, or people who nearly died, but didn't.

I picked up a book by Anita Moorjani, What If This Is Heaven?, which struck me because she mentions that in her near-death experience (having fallen into a coma after a four-year struggle with cancer), it occurred to her that heaven is not a place, but a state, and an achievable state in our realm, no less!

I always thought this could be a possibility, so I started reading the book, which I enjoyed so much I quickly got her first book, Dying To Be Me, and started reading that.

It's not unusual for me to be reading a few books at once, and at the same time as the Anita Moorjani books, I also picked up a book by Mike Dooley, an author I'd never heard of, but flipping through The Top Ten Things Dead People Want You To Know, I found it funny and light-hearted, so grabbed that as well.

As I read them simultaneously, they seemed to be making the same points, but sometimes in opposite ways.

For example, Mike Dooley is a proponent of the "thoughts become things" movement. Anita Moorjani does not like this approach, and basically says that when you hold yourself accountable for every thought in your head, you can easily make yourself crazy. And we should not be making ourselves crazy in this life, we should be adoring the magnificence that we are.

Anita Moorjani also has issues with the Law of Attraction, feeling that it can cause people to blame themselves when bad things happen to them, and blame is never useful, and bad things don't happen to us because of something we thought.

Then, I Googled Mike Dooley, and found that he was one of the interviewees in The Secret, which is a movie all about The Law of Attraction!

I found it interesting that I liked books by both authors, and liked what they both had to say, and kind of felt like they were both saying the same thing, even though they were kind of saying opposite things.

So, I thought it would be useful for those of us interested in how our thoughts manifest in our lives to look at thoughts themselves, so we can parse this.

I'm interested, not only because I like both authors and what they say, but also because I see where Anita Moorjani is coming from.

After I had my son, almost three and a half years ago, I developed anxiety that close to reduced me to tears more than once.

I would imagine the absolute worst possible things happening, and not being capable of protecting him. I'm certain this was from a combination of hormones, the realization that I'd brought an innocent life into an uncertain (read: violent) world and he had only me (yikes!) to rely on to protect him, having moved to a new town where I knew no one and had no family, and looking at Facebook where all sorts of awful things pop into your headspace all the time.

To top it off, my husband would often travel for work, leaving me alone to manage these fears by myself.

Every time a terrible thought came to me, I not only had to wrestle with the terror it created, but also the (mistaken!) idea that I'd planted a seed in the universe somewhere to potentially make it happen. I believe this is what Anita Moorjani is talking about when she says that thoughts do not become things.

I feel certain that I am not alone in experiencing this maddening internal struggle with unwelcome thoughts.

I too, believe that this type of thought does not manifest in one's life. If anything, the way the universe responds to the energy we create with these fearful thoughts is to cause them to happen in a benign, harmless way, to show us that there is nothing to worry about. For example, if you're fearful of, let's say tall men with salt and pepper hair, then a person fitting this description might show up in your life to offer you help when you need it, or in some other way that is is completely harmless. It's up to us to open our eyes and see this.

Back to Mike Dooley's book, I think what Mike Dooley means by "thoughts become things" is that beliefs, whether mistaken or otherwise, we have about ourselves and the world we live in become the reality we experience.

So, if we think we can do something, we can. If we think we can't, we can't. If we think the world is a violent place, then that's what we will see. Every person we pass on the street will feel like a threat. If we relax and know everything is OK, we'll see that everything actually is OK, better than OK, everything is amazing beyond our comprehension; this is what we should focus on.

It is the nature of the mind to think. We can stop the thoughts for a bit, through meditation or focusing on one thing, like gardening, running, whatever, but the thoughts inevitably come back. That's what the mind does, it thinks. Of course we should not feel like we're going to make something bad happen every time we have a bad thought. But I think we should look at why we're all having awful thoughts.

I don't look at the news anymore (how do we even define news today?). I felt awful every time I looked at Facebook, so I deactivated my account.

I'm focusing more on the awesomeness of life. Seeing life as an adventure to be thrilled by. Like children do. For my son, going to the supermarket is as much fun as going to the playground or the science museum. He loves it all. He knows that life is an exciting adventure to be lived and enjoyed, not feared.

The more we remember this, the more our thoughts will reflect this, as will the tapestry of our lives.

When Mike Dooley says thoughts become things, maybe he means, be mindful (ha!) of where you're placing your attention. What you focus on will grow (turn off the "news"), so focus on the amazing, magnificence of you!