It’s one trick, Nancy, to manifest exactly what you want.

It’s another to bring about something even better.

Leave the door open,
    The Universe

How? Expect miracles, Nancy. Don’t attach to unimportant details. Don’t insist “how” your dreams will come true. Prepare to be amazed. Feel the joy when you daydream. Take baby steps in the dark. Every single day physically do something about your dreams. And most important, saunter.

I’m convinced that this anxiety running through my life is the tension between what I “should be” and what I am. My anxiety doesn’t come from thinking about the future but from wanting to control it. It seems to begin whenever I smuggle into my mind an expectation about how I or others should be. It is the tension between my desire to control the world and the recognition that I can’t. “I will be what I will be” — where is the anxiety in that? Anxiety is the recognition that I might not reach the rung on the opinion-ladder I have just set for myself. I fear death most when I am about to exceed what I believe others think of me; then death threatens to cut me off from myself, because “myself” is not yet.

But no. On to Plan B. Perhaps the Puccini again. Letting images behind my eyelids appear and disappear at will.

Yes.

Tonight I decided to try sound healing meditation and really enjoyed it, particularly one meditation that was about peeling layers away. Very relaxing and liberating.

Our power lies in our clarity about the role our work can play in the creation of a more beautiful world. The miracle is to think of our career as our contribution, however small, to the healing of the universe.

~~~~~

A Course in Miracles says that the presence of fear is a sure sign we’re trusting in our own strength.

I need to get crackin’ on 20 wishes …

However, finally, a random Tweet about Sania of Sania’s Brow Bar in Manhattan made me recall that I had read about her in a magazine. Turns out she’s been in most prominent women’s magazines because she specializes in shaping brows to frame your face.

I have visited her twice now and there is an incremental process in the works that will get my brows to a shaplier and more flattering place. But in the meantime, I must let them grow in, which is partly liberating and partly excruciating because I look like a grizzly bear. Sania is on vacation and my next appointment with her is not until August 19.

“Throw away your magnified mirror,” she said. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

So I am learning discipline, a means to an end, keeping the greater good in sight. Maybe not what Buddha had in mind, but …

Gems that speak to different aspects of me:

Adam and Eve were naked in the garden of Eden but not embarrassed. That doesn’t mean they were physically naked. It means they were emotionally naked, totally real and honest, yet they were not embarrassed because they felt accepted completely for who they were.

~~~~~

There is practically a mania these days for blaming the events of our childhood for our current despair. What the ego doesn’t want us to see is that our pain doesn’t come from the love we weren’t given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren’t giving in the present.

In every relationship, in every moment, we teach either love or fear. “To teach is to demonstrate.” As we demonstrate love towards others, we learn that we are lovable and we learn how to love more deeply. As we demonstrate fear or negativity, we learn self-condemnation and we learn to feel more frightened of life. We will always learn what we have chosen to teach.
–Marianne Williamson, A Return To Love