Boycott fear

I accept what is.

These are the words I have been telling myself after an election I have found to be traumatic and sad. Yesterday I was in mourning. I think that was the right response, after seeing my hopes for a lot of positive change in my country get dashed by the election of someone who doesn’t seem to care about my most deeply held values — like the desire to preserve the earth so we can all continue living on it, or the vision of embracing people from diverse lifestyles and backgrounds.

But out of change, and out of pain comes growth. I am grateful for the opportunities this will give us to grow as a nation.

And one big way I hope we grow is to stop trying to manipulate each other using fear.

Throughout the election and, indeed, throughout history, by many people, fear has been used as a great manipulator to get people to do what you want. People use it because it can be very effective. They have an end goal, which may be desirable, and they use fear to try to push people towards that goal, not caring how it affects the people they are influencing.

In this election, some used fear to push people away from one candidate, some from the other. Fear was used so heavily for so long, that seeing a fear-based article about something “those Republicans” are doing in my email this morning just made me feel sick. I have a lot of friends who are on the other side on this election. Loving, caring people, who genuinely believe that their path is the best for our nation. I don’t want to be divided from them, based on fear.

And fear is the opposite of love. It is the opposite of what I want in my life. It is the opposite of peace. And I can choose to have peace in chaos. I can choose to be filled with love, even if the world were sinking around me, and in my last dying breath, I could choose love and peace. That is the life that I want to live.

So I have decided. I’m done being motivated by fear. So I am boycotting it. Any email I get that asks me to do something based on fear, I’m going to delete. Any media I see that is spreading fear, I’m going to stop reading/watching/listening. Any group or person who continues to spread fear, I’m going to unsubscribe. And I’m not going to use fear to get people to do/think/believe/buy what I want.

While some undesirable things may happen in the next four years, I prefer to increase love and light in this world.

#boycottfear with me. And let’s together make this world a more loving place to live in.

More than enough

I manifested a free trailer. This was what I wanted. Something for free, a little (translate a lot) of my own energy put into it. A true do-it-yourselfer, I believed that if I could just stop spending money, I would finally have enough. And I was always afraid of not having enough. So I got a shitty trailer. Found out it is worth as much as I paid. Oops.

So I was thinking, why did I manifest a free, worthless trailer?

I have believed that there is not enough money for everyone. Those who have a lot of money have gotten it at the expense of others, by using the energy of other people for their own personal gain.

I had experience with a prosperity message in a Christian college that basically said if you believe it, you can receive it. One leader at the school manifested a free car, worth over $50,000. She went on about it in her speech, and it really turned me off. Because there was no part of me that wanted to just have the nicest stuff around. I wanted to give myself away to God, not see how much stuff I could acquire for myself.

I viewed the prosperity message with distaste. But I think it’s because it was a warped, lower version of the real thing. Later, there was another leader who was a missionary to Africa. She loved people, and when she saw people who were hungry, she would multiply food, like Jesus did. One time she was at a place where people were starving, and she manifested an airplane full of food. That’s a type of prosperity message I could accept.

Throughout my life, I can see that I have been looking for the cheapest option always, always trying to conserve money, always believing that there wouldn’t be enough if I spent too much. Then I would sometimes go on a spending spree and spend a bunch of money, trying to shake off the feeling of lack.

I used as evidence for my lack mentality that there are so many poverty-stricken people in the world. And that if the prosperity message didn’t apply to them, it isn’t a real thing. I felt wrong, having more than they did just because I live in America.

But I just had this thought. Imagine a poor farmer in Africa who can barely grow enough food to feed his family, certainly not enough for anything extra, maybe cannot even send his kids to school because he needs them to work on the farm. Now imagine this farmer starts surrendering to the divine in him and sees the divine manifesting through him everything he needs. He moves into a state of flow. Therefore, he gets luck. It rains when he needs it, gets sun when he needs it, the frost doesn’t come too late or too early. He gets inspired ideas for how to enrich the soil or how to do symbiotic planting, how to increase yields. Now he produces 2-3 times as much produce as before, with less effort. When he harvests, he has plenty to feed his family and sell to others. He trades with a carpenter to build a nicer house, with teachers to send his kids to school, with others for whatever else he needs. He has more of what you would traditionally need money to buy.

Money is just a measure of energy. It is more efficient to trade currency than potatoes. You don’t have to trade directly with the person that has the thing you want. But the farmer has created money because he has generated more energy. Now the carpenter who was wasting energy because he couldn’t find work is generating more energy by building the farmer’s house. More money is created. If they were to measure this energy, they would measure it in some form of currency. And as more and more people would believe that the divine in them is manifesting everything they need, living from flow, experiencing this luck, there would be more and more currency to represent the expanded levels of energy.

If I believe that I am limitless, that there is a limitless energy flowing through me, why would I be afraid to share that energy with others? With circulating currency?

Because I have had this belief, I have been resistant to restarting this blog. I wanted to conserve energy. I was all about personal and spiritual growth, but only for myself. Because I was trying to conserve the energy within myself. But I see that by doing that, I have blocked the flow. It cannot flow through me, since I’m not willing to circulate it. So the flow dribbles to a drip, and I operate under just working as hard as I can to get everything I can, but try to expend as little of it as I can — the protestant work ethic.

But truly, if I want more, I need to give it away.

So what to do about this situation? I need to forgive myself, I think for blocking the flow. For believing that there isn’t enough, and forgive those that passed this belief onto me.

As much as I didn’t want to be like the rich man in the parable in the Bible, who stored up riches in barns, refused to give to the beggar, then died and lost it all, that is exactly what I became. I became the exact thing I feared. Only it wasn’t money I stored up. It was other people’s ideas. I tried to take all the ideas I could get, store them inside me, and use them to just improve me, no one else.

For that, to you, the world. I am sorry. I have not shared who I am with you. I have not shared my truth with you. I have kept it hidden, only for me. But by keeping it for only me, I have blocked the flow, received only a little, tried to conserve that. Now I see that I matter. That the truth that is who I am matters. That you need what I have to offer. I am so sorry for believing you didn’t. For believing that you didn’t care about me, didn’t want to know me, and didn’t want to receive what is in me to give. I have lived in fear of what you would say to me, what you would think of me.

I’m sorry for keeping the light that I have hidden, as if under a bushel, like the song goes. I hid it for fear there wouldn’t be enough for me and everyone else. I hid it because I didn’t think anyone else wanted the light. I hid it because I believed that I only matter to myself. I was wrong on all counts. I am sorry. And world out there, I ask you to forgive me. Because you do need me. And I do need you too.