Tag: focus

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One Foot In Front Of The Other

My Mother

I admired and loved my mother deeply. She was a wonderful woman. I miss her dearly. She was also a fiercely independent woman. She lived alone the last thirty years of her life. For many of those years she had given up her car and got to different places through different means. Sometimes she took the bus. Sometimes friends would drive her. When I was not at work and especially the last ten, twenty years, I would drive her to where she needed to go. And sometimes she walked. Every day after work I would drive from work to Mom’s house to see if she needed anything. One day I got there and she left a note that she had walked up the pike to the drug store. I got back in my car and drove up the pike and saw her walking on the sidewalk on the way back home. I made a u-turn as fast as I was able and as I watched her walking, I observed how the arthritis had slowed her down. Each step was an effort but she kept moving. I caught up with her and she got in my car. She was glad that I picked her up and I said, “Mom, I know your arthritis is bad. How are you able to walk all the way up to the CVS and back?” She said, “I just put one foot in front of the other and just keep going.”

Your Focus

Yes — absolutely yes — you may have a long distance to travel. You may have a long way to go in whatever you are doing, but you can get there by taking steps…consistent actions … consistent effort … every day … one step, then another, then another, and so on. Focus on each step, not on the distance. Your focus is your vision. Your focus proves your intention. Your focus strengthens your faith. Your focus is sharpened by your gratitude. Every step you take brings you another step closer to your destination. The armies of Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world traversing 22,000 miles over twelve years from Greece to India and back to Babylon…..one step at a time. I recently viewed an internet video of an elderly man mightily struggling to carry a case of water up a flight of stairs at an apartment complex. The video was taken at the time without his knowledge. He was a man in his sixties working a delivery job to make ends meet. He had some stroke residuals and you could observe that each step up the stairs was a struggle. He used the wall next to the steps as kind of a brace. He just contined to focus on one step at a time until he reached the top. As it turned out, the person who took the video subsequently spoke with the man and a gofundme campaign was started for him with wonderful results. The funding he received meant he would not have to struggle with delivering cases of water up flights of steps anymore. All emanating from the man just focusing on putting one foot in front of the other.

Stick With It

Many of the things that have been mentioned in previous posts are not easy. While they may sound simple, they require hard work and discipline. The concepts are definitely not for you if you wish to merely dabble in the manifesting process and will bail out when results are not forthcoming according to the time schedule that you want. The concepts won’t work if you constantly take days off. The concepts won’t work if you doubt. You must stick with it — one foot in front of the other — until the results are achieved. Adjust your focus and your attention to putting one foot in front of the other in whatever it is that you are doing. That is what is eventually going to get it done for you no matter what the deal is that you are working on.

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Your Very Best That You Are Able To Do

There is a morning prayer that goes like this: “My Creator, help me to make my best effort today better than it was yesterday.” Whenever I pray that, I usually follow that up with with apologies to my Maker if my past ” my best” was actually a crappy version of “my best”.

Having vision, intent and faith in a particular goal, no matter how tiny or large that goal is, means that you simply can’t bullshit yourself when you say “I’m giving it my very best shot”. Ask yourself every time “Are you really?” In the image above, I have no idea what the runners particular goal may be with his run. My perception is that he is giving it his very best whatever the goal is. Every muscle, every part of him seems laser focused on achieving what he is trying to achieve. No posing for the camera. No looking to the left or to the right. No smiles for the camera. Only total concentration and effort in achieving whatever it is that he has set out to achieve.

When you are engaging in specific activity to manifest a particular desire that you have, doing what the man in the image above is doing, putting one foot in front of the other with total concentration and focus, is usually what’s gonna eventually get it done for you. We all need to just kick back and relax from time to time. However, you cannot say to yourself “I’m doing my best” and then spend three to four hours watching tv every night. Of course if what you desire to manifest is a history of watching of tv, then you have succeeded. Congrats. If that is not your manifestation desire however, then you have failed at truly giving it your best and you are just sabotaging yourself. Self-sabotage is definitely one of mankind’s favorite hobbies, and one of the most detrimental. Telling yourself that you are doing your best, when in fact you really aren’t, is an insidious con job that you put over on yourself almost always with bad results. I know because I have been there. I think that we all have to some degree.

At the end of each day, spend a bit of time before you fall asleep, reviewing your activities for that day, starting from when you woke up and continuing over the course of the day. It doesn’t have to be a long time. Five minutes will do. Review objectively. Do not spend time berating yourself where you observe that you could have done better. That does you absolutely no good. You must remember that the scriptural command to “judge not” also includes yourself. If there is no place where you observe that you could have done better, then congratulations, you have had a most great and wonderful day. If there are areas where you could have done better, simply note it to yourself and vow to to work on that in the future. If you do this, you will find that “your best” does, over time, become better and better. The result of that is the prize you are after, the prize we are all after….. greater and greater success in your manifesting your desires.

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Successfully Slay Stress

Stress. At one time or another, we are all chased by stress. It affects your health. It affects your thinking. It affects your emotions. It affects your beliefs. And almost always, the effects of stress are not for your good with regard to manifesting the life that you want to live. So, how do you make stress stop chasing you so that you have time to breathe, so you can live free and with joy?

Stress is generated by our emotions. Emotions are generated by our thoughts. The answer to the above question is to make the soverign choice to change the content of your thoughts. Choose to block out those thoughts that create stressful feelings (usually due to a fear of something such as fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of poor health, etc, ). They are to your detriment. Instead, focus your mind on those thoughts that create non-stressful feelings (always emanating from love) that are extremely powerful and yield benefit to you. When you are experiencing stress, your mind is dealing with weakening emotions and your mind is trying to come up with ways for you cope with them. This saps your inner energy lowering your ability to manifest your desires. When your mind is focused on empowering emotions, it enhances your inner energy thus increasing your ability to manifest your desires. It is like a mathematical equation.

Look at the image at the top of this post. It represents a hazy quantum wave of energy. Without going into a long explanation of quantum mechanics, I will give you the super-short and sloppy version. In quantum physics, all matter is energy, energy that vibrates at different frequencies. In scientific studies, it was discovered that a particle of matter only became solid when it was observed by the scientist observer. When observation was withdrawn, it reverted back to a wave of pure energy. That’s it in a nutshell. The long and precise version would take a year and a day to explain.

If you can train yourself to remove your inner focus away from the cause of your stress, you will actually learn how to remove it from your life, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, depending how successful you are in your ability to choose and maintain your focus. Energy, in the form of stress in your physical world, will revert back to pure energy when observation is removed and depending what you choose to observe next, will then change over to something else.

It is well understood that if your current situation contains a tyrannical boss or a professor that may suck or a very challenging assignment or a spouse or signifigant other that is constantly on your case about something or some other stress creator, it may not be a lah-de-dah simple matter for you to change your inner focus. You must cultivate a ferocious intention to do it. You must make the irrevocable choice to change old habits. You must choose to believe that you can do it. When you do, and you have made the decision to focus only on those things that are attributes of the Universal Mind, then as the esteemed author Emmet Fox put it, you will then have the joy of discovering the golden key that unlocks the world of manifesting your reality during your lifetime without the specter of stress hanging over you.

Now for a bit of fun. Attempt to say aloud the title of this post, “Successfully Slay Stress”, very fast, three times in a row. It is an old-fashioned tongue-twister. In order to say it aloud three times very quickly successfully, you have to put great focus into it. You have to totally concentrate on coordinating your vocal chords with your lips and teeth and tongue. When you have done it successfully, then put that same focus and concentration on eliminating stress from your daily life. It’s all in your hands.