In the world of consciously manifesting your reality, have you ever heard of the concept of “flipswitching”? It is a manifesting technique introduced by author Lynn Grabhorn. It is elegantly simple in concept. It is totally free. It can be done by anyone, with any level of education, at any level of society, anywhere in the world. As in most manifesting techniques however, the “catch” is that it requires total commitment on your part to the process. It also requires your patience, your perserverence and your determined self discipline in order to for you to produce successful results. It is not for those who dabble in it, then flitter off to something else when they hit a roadblock or become impatient. If you decide to get onboard with it, it can be a fun and enjoyable activity that you look forward to each day as opposed to a chore that you have to do in order to get something you want.
A Way To Break Free
Whenever a detrimental thought infects your mind, like a virus, if you allow it to settle in, you have just made the choice to go backward. And you will. When a negative thought comes in the door of your house so to speak (your mind), immediately flip your switch. By this is meant, immediately think of something that makes you feel good, something that you are or that you have experienced or are experiencing now that you appreciate, that you enjoy. It could be a person or group of people, a past or future event, something about your personality or your body or a skill that you have that makes you feel really good. It could be something that has occurred in the reality of your innner mind but has not come about yet in the physical realm. It could be…….whatever. Once you decide on about a minimum of a half dozen items in whatever category you choose, then practice holding each thought (and the accompanying pleasurable feeling) for between fifteen and thirty consecutive seconds. Train yourself. It sounds simple and it is but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It will be difficult at first to do it for more than a few seconds but just keep working on it. Keep the “feeling good” thought fully occupying your mind and no other thoughts will have room to barge in and take over.
Old Habits Will Strenuously Object
Warning: If you decide to dive into the pool of “flipswitching”, your addiction to negative emotions (fear, worry, doubt, panic, etc.) will strenuously object to this manifesting technique. You are evicting them and they will not go quietly. Just like the junkie who is hooked on drugs, your old habits of thought and feeling will tell you life can’t go on without a fix. You may start flipswitching, see nothing happening after a while and give up telling yourself that it’s just a bunch of baloney. If you really and truly commit to the process, you will most assuredly ultimately begin to see good things happening. That should give you incentive to perservere. At the very least commit (no matter what) to thirty consecutive days (no days off). Another warning: negative feel goods (ie., hurting others, imagining harm to others, etc) won’t work to bring you what you desire. The Universe will give you something but it will not be what you want.
Backsliding Will Turn Off The Flipswitch
Everyday responsibilities and chores can be overwhelming. They can squeeze the juice right out of you. You might have three or four (or more) things at once to deal with. You may find your inner focus swerving over to a multitudes of “if I don’t do this, then this bad thing will happen to me” and “I don’t have time to focus on anything but my problems.” Once you allow your focus to change, the flipswitch gets turned off and the good stuff that is on its way to you comes to a screeching halt. In my own experience, I have found the toughest part of the flipswitching “feel good” experience is staying there once you get there. Also, I have found that the manifestation usually comes much slower than I desire, causing impatience, causing switching my focus to other things. All of us humans have faults and frailities that tend to trip us up. There are a number of ways to approach flipswitching. Experiment. Search for the way that works best for you. Then, stick with it and reap the rewards.
I was born in 1953, the year Dwight Eisenhower was elected president with the slogan “I Like Ike”. My pre-adolescent life stretched into the presidency of John F. Kennedy, (“Leadership For the 60’s”} and the beginning of Lyndon B. Johnson’s tenure (“All the Way with LBJ”). I recently was following some of my own advice (see blog post of 1/7/21, Unclutter Your Life)) and throwing out the contents of stored away boxes of papers and other sundry unneeded items. As I was looking through the items as I tossed them in the trash barrel, I came across an old college report that I had written. It was an assignment in a college elective course named “American Folklore”. The idea behind the assignment was to assemble a collection of something that was representative of “Americana”. After assembling the collection, the assignment was to bring the collection into class and give an accompanying report about said collection and how it related to the folklore of America. There were no restrictions. The professor told us to use our imaginations.
The Memory Collection
I decided to collect pleasurable memories of pre-adolescent childhood from various people that I knew, both young and old. I handed them out a sheet describing the assignment and asked them to write down as many pleasurable remembrances of things that they did growing up between the ages of 5 and 12. It could be anything at all — watching cartoons on tv, going on family outings, fishing or swimming, playing in the backyard or park, etc. While waiting for the sheets to come back to me, I wrote up my own sheet as well, covering the period of time from 1953 through 1965. Most certainly, it was a very different era in America than the one we currently live in. Very different. As I reviewed my sheet, fond remembrances started cascading through the layers of my mind. Experiences, people, places, events became alive again. We did not have much money but my childhood was in fact, rich with experiences. In this blog post, and subsequent blog posts, I will relate some of them to you. Perhaps you experienced some of the same things that I did.
Flipswitch Kindling
How do pleasurable pre-adolescent remembrances relate to manifesting your reality? Well, the answer to that is by way of the manifesting technique called flipswitching. I will speak further of this technique in future blog posts, as well as in the book I am currently in the process of writing. The basic gist of flipswitching is to bring forth something in your mind, a thought form that you are able to sustain for at least a half minute or so, that does no harm to anyone and brings you a good feeling inside. Something basically that puts you in a “feeling good” mode. There are many ways to do this. One of them is to pull out of your memory storage banks, fond memories of things of a positive nature that you enjoyed doing at a particular stage of your life. It is my intention to use the memories of my childhood that I will be describing as part of my “flipswitch arsenal” whenever I use this specific method to manifest something in my life.
Grandmom and Grandpop
Always, always a pleasurable experience. They had a neighborhood store in Philadelphia until the later 1950’s. At that time they moved to New Jersey to a lakeside house. It was a wonderful place to visit. My maternal grandparents always welcomed our visits. Of course my brother and I would go swimming in the cedar water lake. Grandpop even added to the sandy soil of that area to make a small sandy beach for us. There was a small pier to fish and dive off of (plenty of “cannonballs”). He also had a rowboat that allowed us to travel to different parts of the lake. We used to bring inflated inner tubes and float all around the lake. After we were done swimming, we would take a shower to get the cedar water off of us at an outside shower that my Grandpop had hooked up outside of the tool shed. Then we would go in the house and Grandmom would have food for us to eat as well as “soda water” (her term for soda). We would listen to stories from my Grandpop. We would play pinochle. We would listen to Grandmom and Grandpop speaking Polish and me wondering what the heck they were saying. We would feed the ducks and geese. I loved to go out to the front yard and sit on the cement bench and just sit and look at all the rose bushes and flowers that were out front. I would explore all the neat stuff in Grandpop’s tool shed. Sometimes I would take a walk with Grandmom to the local diner and she would buy me a basket of french fries. Whenever I went with my Grandpop to the farmers market, he would always buy me a few comic books from the guy who sold discounted books and magazines from a stall. What a wonderful time we always had at Grandpop and Grandmom’s house. Most of all, we felt loved.
My Brother
My brother was only three years older than me. We experienced a lot together as we were growing up. Many good times. When we were involved in neighborhood games of baseball, football and basketball, my brother always insisted that I be included even though I was always the youngest one there. Up until I was six or seven, we shared the same bedroom and the same bed (“move over, you’re on my side”) until we moved to makeshift bedrooms in the attic.
Many memories. Sharing experiences together at my grandparents’ house…when Mom took us to different parks or treated us to hamburgers and french fries…riding our bikes…joking around and craning our heads from the end of the bed to see the tv in the living room in bed at night…one time we started laughing at something on the tv until we heard from our father “you kids better go to sleep in there or I’m gonna have to come in there (which meant “the belt”) …him sneaking out of the bedroom late at night to raid the refrigerator for us (knowing we would get” the belt” if our father caught us)…going camping together at Hospitality Creek Campground,,,sleeping outside in the back yard overnight under our makeshift “tent” (an old blanket tied to the backyard fence) curbball…wallball…watching tv together, especially Twilight Zone on Friday nights…watching him pitch over at the Little League (one of the few left-handed pitchers) taking our bikes, or the bus, to go to the movies (the Harwan, Coronet, Crescent and Ritz)…going “into town” on the bus to Leary’s Book Store…doing the dishes together after dinner when Mom had a night shift job…just so many memories during that time period (late 50’s, early 60’s).
It was as if a giant had picked me up and just flung me full force against a cement wall when my brother died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of twenty-three. I will always have those good memories of us growing up though, for as long as I live, and I think I will still have them even when I go into “the great beyond”.
Ball Games
While there was organized baseball over at the Little League field, unorganized or sandlot ball was the order of the day growing up. We played choose-up-sides baseball at a vacant lot next to the VFW. Neighborhood men even constructed a makeshift backstop for us. You needed at least six kids for a game (two fielders and a pitcher) although at least eight was best. We would go knocking on doors if we didn’t have enough kids. Baseballs used until the cover came off and then taped up with masking tape. One lady whose house was across the street from the field we called “the witch”. If someone hit the baseball on her lawn, we would have to get it fast because she would come out of the house and confiscate the baseball. She said one time somebody had hit her house and broke a window.
Two hand touch football in the street (“car comin’) or on the VFW parking lot if there weren’t any cars parked there (three completions is a first down). Tackle football on grass yards. A football game that you could play with just three kids we called “Kill The Man With The Ball”. You can use your imagination to figure out the rules of that game. Whoever lasted the longest without getting tackled, was the winner. With just three kids you could also play the “base stealing game”. It was two bases about 60 feet or so apart. One kid at each base. They would throw the baseball to each other. One kid on a base. When kid A threw to kid B, the base stealer on base B would run to base A to try and ‘steal the base” before kid B could get the ball back to kid A. If he made it before kid B got the ball back to kid A, he stole the base. If not, he was “out” and one of the other two kids became the base stealer. The base stealer was allotted one out. You could also have “rundowns” where the base stealer stops between the two bases and either kid A or kid B would have to tag him out. One time I chased a kid halfway down the block on a rundown tag. The one with the most stolen bases won the game. We played basketball at a makeshift dirt court with the wooden backboard sturdily fastened to a large tree in a neighbor’s back yard (they let us use the “court” anytime we wanted).
No computers, cell phones or electronics back then. A lot of outdoors stuff. Wiffle ball, where you could easily throw “curveballs” and you didn’t need as large a playing field as you did for baseball. Two ball games where you could play either one-on-one or alone were curbball and wallball. Curbball was where you had a sponge rubber type ball (but not too spongey, it had to be on the hard side). One player would be the fielder and would stand on the other side of the street. The other player would hit the ball against the curb and try and get it past the fielder. Get it to different areas for a single, double, triple and home run. If you hit it to the fielder and he caught it, it was an out. If he dropped it it was an error and you were credited with a single. If you tried to hit the edge of the curb to make the ball go farther and missed the curb, it was an out. If the ball went outside the designated “foul lines”, it was an out. Three outs to an inning. Nine innings to a game. When I played curbball alone, I always broadcast the game pitch-by-pitch in my mind (“Bunning winds and pitches, pop-up to the first baseman”.) Wallball was very similar only instead of a curb, we used the wall of the nearby hosiery mill which was about 15, 20 feet high and the “playing field” where the fielder stood was larger than just the width of a street.
Penny Candy
Oh, what a nickel could buy back then. A pack of baseball cards (with the complementary slab of stale bubble gum). A full size candy bar. A bottle of soda made by a local soda company was only a nickel as long as you drank it at the store at the fountain stool (another two cents if you took it out of the store because of the deposit). That magical glass case of penny candy with three rows of different penny candies. Orange turkish paste, peppermint candy cigarettes, caramel cream bullseyes, chocalate malt balls, candy dot strips, tricolor coconut strips, little wax soda bottles with sweet syrup inside, mary janes, turkish taffy, green, red and black licorice sticks, shoestring licorice, pretzel rods, bazooka bubble gum, little b-bats banana or strawberry taffies, red hot dollars, and on and on, all put into a little brown or white paper bag. That last penny’s worth was always the hardest choice. My eyes would slowly go over all three rows of candy again. Then I would finally make a decision when the owner said “Come on, I don’t have all day”. The candy store owner always had a cigar in his mouth and was also the town judge. When I walked out of the store with a bag full of candy, it was a great feeling.
I will never forget the day that my brother came into possession of a dollar that he had earned doing errands for a neighbor (he was 8 or 9, I was 5 or 6) and he spent the entire dollar on an assortment of penny candy for Mom, me and him. We were so impressed that he would do that for us. The candy store also sold Breyers ice cream. The cones cost ten cents, two scoops into a cake cone. My favorite was vanilla with the little specks of ground vanilla mixed into the ice cream. On Friday nights Mom would give me thirty cents for three cones, for her, my brother and me. They put thin wax paper over the top of the cones and I would walk home with the three cones. The store was only a block away from us. Actually on the six block walk from my school to our house, there were no less than five candy and soda stores. One of them was called Joe’s Sweet Shop and had a huge offering of five cent candy bars. I think he had every one that was ever invented. There was also a five-and-dime in town and two fully stocked newsstands that also sold candy and soda. Our town was “Sugar City”.
