Part of the 30 Day Life Recovering Diet is meditation.  No, not sitting cross legged on the floor chanting "ohm".  The type of meditation is entirely up to each individual.

Today I am mowing a 2-3 acre section of the yard.  Mowing is meditative.  It takes just enough presence to keep my mind from obsessing and it's just mindless enough that thoughts can come and go easily and freely.  How can that be meditation?

Meditation is focus.  Sometimes it is focused thought.  Sometimes it is focused non-thought.  It is simply a pause in the continuous chatter of the intellectual mind that allows room for the inspired thought.

How will you choose to meditate today?

"If you believe that you must work hard in order to deserve the money that comes to you, then money cannot come to you unless you do work hard. Financial success, or any other kind of success, does not require hard work. It does require alignment of thought. You simply cannot offer negative thought about things that you desire and then make up for it with action or hard work. When you learn to direct your own thoughts, you will discover the true leverage of Energy alignment."

--- Abraham

Excerpted from the book "Money and the Law of Attraction: Learning to Attract Health, Wealth and Happiness"

Our children are the seedlings of our life.  The question is - how do we encourage them to grow?  What do we expose them to without our awareness?  Is our influence confined to what we say to them or is it what we say around them, how we act around them, and the vibration of our own energy?

How many times have we, as parents, had discussions filled with conflict, fear, judgment, or criticism around infants and toddlers as if those tender young seedlings weren't even in the room?  Even if those small children cannot understand the meaning our words, they absorb the meaning of our feelings.  How many times have we told our children to do something that we ourselves do not do?  Remember the old cliche, "Do as I say, not as I do?"

Children understand double standards.  They often ignore our words.  They watch our actions and absorb our energy.

When small children are in the room while we verbally judge and criticize someone, our children learn judgment and criticism.  If we indulge in negativity, we teach our children about negativity.  If we are perfectionists and harshly criticize ourselves, our children absorb perfectionism.

When talk about our children in their presence, they absorb the labels, key phrases, and tags that we give them.  "He's such a good boy."  "He's a picky eater."  "He's doesn't try."  Without knowing it, we seed the soul of our children's minds and hearts with weeds.

How then can we better parents?

Awareness.  When we become aware of the weeds in our own minds and hearts and develop processes to outgrow them, our children absorb those processes too.  They watch us growing.  They feel us growing.

Photos from Flickr.com courtesy of Tico.

How do you know when you're in alignment?  If you're on the right path?  When you are, everything just seems to fall into place.  You're heart knows and the Universe smiles on you.

Lori Massey is a sign of my alignment.  A few weeks ago she was surfing the internet and found Cedar Hill Massage.  She was particularly interested in life coaching.  Yesterday I drove an hour and half to Jackson, Ohio to meet Lori at her store, The Tea Caddy of Jackson, 740-288-4832.  

The first thing you see at the front door of the Tea Caddy is MAGIC.  A small wren chose to build her nest in an artificial wreath and blessed the entrance with two baby birds. That's just the beginning of the magic of the Tea Caddy!  Go through the door and you enter a sacred space filled with Victorian teapots, tea cozies, and special teas.  The atmosphere inside is infused with Lori's welcoming and infectious energy.

Lori is doing some exciting things in Jackson.  Beginning July 25, 2009, from 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m., she's introducing a LIVE morning talk show called "The Hub", Your Connection to Mind, Body & Spirit.  The Hub offers inspirational speakers, health & wellness advisors, and more.  You can call Lori at the Tea Caddy at 740-288-4832.

Lori is a connector.  She reaches out, finds out what people need, what their heart's desire is and connects them with ther people to help them on their way.  And, she's been joined by Carla Wamsley, of Sitting Pretty, an affiliate of Tope's Furniture Gallery of Gallipolis,Ohio.  Carla is a salesperson and has added that spark of fire to Lori's gift for connecting people.   Guess what I am?

I only meant to stay an hour at the Tea Caddy but ended up staying the whole afternoon.  We laughed, talked, and shared our ideas for following our dreams and how to help other people do the same.  We brainstormed about my giving a group coaching workshop at the Tea Caddy in September.  Lori introduced me to someone I may be able to help. 

Everything came together yesterday afternoon.  Perfect alignment.

According to the Law of Attraction, the vibrational energy of our core beliefs attracts all relationships and experiences to us.   That vibrational energy is transmitted to the world around us not only through the actions we take but also through our thoughts and feelings.  We literally create our lives through unseen means.  One might ask, if we get to create our lives in the way we want, why would we attract relationships that cause us pain?

We attract relationships that cause us pain because we need to affirm our core beliefs about ourselves and we attract the relationships we need to help us grow. Therefore, a victim must attract a persecutor.  A caretaker must have someone who needs care.  A perfectionist must attract someone who is critical and judgmental.  An insecure person must attract someone who can’t love her, and a person with low self-esteem must attract someone who tells her she’s not good enough.

Repeating patterns in relationships that cause painful emotions are signals to prompt us to look for changes that need to be made within.  Just when we thought we were done with an uncomfortable relationship pattern, it can repeat itself with another person to teach us another lesson and to allow us to heal at a deeper level.

Many times these relationship patterns repeat themselves because we have not completed the learning experience.  We leave the relationship before the lesson is learned.  Whatever we do not heal in one relationship, we carry on to the next one.  We leave with re-opened wounds, old scars, and all our defenses intact.  Those wounds, scars, and defenses are the emotional matrix within which all our relationships develop.  We carry this emotional matrix with us at an unconscious, core level wherever we go.

Awareness is the first key to change. How can we become aware of our emotional matrix? Can we change our core thoughts and feelings to create better relationships?

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No one comes into our lives by accident.  Carolyn Myss, Sacred Contracts

Photo courtesy of Tanakawho from Flickr.com.