You are a Badass (10 page)
The moment you have the audacity to start believing in the not-yet seen, your reality will begin to shift.
THE FOLLOWING IS HUGELY IMPORTANT SO PLEASE PAY VERY CLOSE ATTENTION: You have to change your thinking first, and then the evidence appears. Our big mistake is that we do it the other way around. We demand to see the evidence before we believe it to be true.
Remember, everything you desire is right here, right now. You just have to shift your perception in order to see it made manifest.
“Okay, fine. I believe that I’m hanging poolside with the President of the United States of America. Now what? Do I just call? Or show up at the White House in my flip-flops with a towel around my neck?” When you take the leap and believe in the not-yet seen, you aren’t supposed to know how to make it happen, because if you knew how, you probably would have done it already. This is about radically changing your reality, so the way to go about it is also most likely outside of your present awareness.
Your job isn’t to know the how, it’s to know the
what
and to be open to discovering, and receiving, the how.
Keep your thoughts directed at your goal, do everything that you DO know how to do to make it happen, decide with unwavering determination that it will happen, and be on the lookout for the opportunity.
I had a client who went to Tuscany and looked at a house that was for sale while she was there. At the time, she was a bartender and a poet and could barely scrape together the money to buy a plane ticket to Italy, let alone to buy a Tuscan villa, but she checked it out anyway and completely fell in love with the place. While she instantly knew in her soul that it was her house, she also knew that her bank account had tumbleweeds blowing through it, but she asked the owners to take it off the market anyway because she was going to figure out a way to buy it.
So she flies home, in a stupor, thinking that perhaps she has gone completely insane, but she sticks to her guns and starts asking around for ideas. She is almost immediately buried beneath a pile of warnings from everyone around her:
It’s a huge responsibility not to mention all the complications that come with being in another country and last time I checked you don’t speak Italian nor are you a citizen nor do you know a single thing about home ownership and considering you can’t even afford to get your teeth cleaned how are you planning on paying a mortgage
and yadda, yadda, yadda. Yet she keeps on going, because in spite of all the evidence otherwise,
she believes this is her house
. This is her truth.
Finally someone mentions the idea of pre-renting blocks of time in the house to raise the money to buy it. People could pay for their time a year in advance, she would just need to sell enough blocks of
time to pay for the house, and voila! Cut to her discovering this sort of thing is illegal, going back to the drawing board, trying a million other things, discovering that it’s actually
not
illegal, then pre-selling enough rental slots and borrowing some money and to make a very long and ups-and-downs-y story short, she’s owned the villa for several years and is thinking about buying another.
You have got to get a handle on your thoughts if you want to change your life. As Albert Einstein so aptly noted, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
Here are some tried-and-true ways to show your brain who’s driving the bus:
1. ASK AND IT IS GIVEN
Get quiet, get in The Zone, and get in touch with Source Energy. Clear out the chatter in your brain and create a clean, uncluttered space to impress the thoughts of what you want into the giant thinking substance that is Source Energy. Ask for what you want, send out a nice, clear message in a nice, clear space and begin the manifestation process.
2. ACT AS IF
If you want something badly, even if you don’t have any evidence that it’s possible for you to attain, believe it is anyway. Fake it until you make it. Do it in spite of yourself. Act as if. If you have an intense, undying desire to hang poolside with the president of the United
States of America, think about the things that a person hanging poolside with the leader of the free world would do. Go pick out the bathing suit you’re going to wear. Think of what you’re going to talk about. Get your photos of your trip to the Grand Canyon together to show the commander in chief. Get ready for the event. Tell yourself it’s happening. Act like it’s happening. Put yourself in situations where you will meet people who can make this happen. Stay wide open to opportunities that can lead you to your goal. Live, eat, sleep, and breathe your vision. You may feel like a crazy person, but you won’t when you’re playing Marco Polo with the prez.
3. UPGRADE YOUR ENVIRONMENT
If you aspire to have a more up-leveled and inspiring lifestyle than you presently have, and you’re actively visualizing this for yourself, it’s going to be quite a struggle to keep your thoughts large and in charge if every time you pull up to your rickety-ass home you hear the
Sanford and Son
theme song start up in your head. So even though you’re going to be thinking and imagining the change
before
it happens, do what you can to make some upgrades to where you’re at now. Give the place a paint job and clean it up. Get new furniture or fix up what you already have. Throw out the clutter, let some air in, hang inspiring art on the walls. This will not only help to keep your frequency high, but it will alert The Universe that you’re not screwing around, that you’re doing everything you can and are waiting for further instruction on the
how.
4. MAKE A VISION BOARD
Our minds think in images: If someone says,
a horse wearing red lipstick
, you instantly create a picture in your mind of a horse wearing red lipstick. Feeding your mind full of images of the things and experiences that you want to manifest—your dream house with the infinity pool in Mexico, rolling around on the beach with your red hot lovah, volunteering to help little kids learn how to read at your local library, laughing your face off surrounded by dear friends—is hugely powerful because your mind sends that image out to Source Energy which begins the process of pulling it in. Cut out pictures of places, people, things, and experiences that you want in your life, paste them onto a board and hang it somewhere where you’ll see it all day long. I’ve seen people have completely insane results with this. They’ve manifested, down to the tiniest details, the exact home or piece of furniture or place of employment that they put on their board. It’s freaky- deaky. And super easy. It’s like having a craft day with God. Give it a shot.
5. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH PEOPLE WHO THINK THE WAY YOU WANT TO THINK
When you hang out with whiners, pessimists, tweakers, bleakers, freakers-outers and life-is-so-unfairers, it’s an uphill climb to keep yourself in a positive headspace. Stay away from people with tiny minds and tiny thoughts and start hanging out with people who see limitless possibility as the reality. Surround yourself with people who act on their big ideas, who take action on making positive change in the world and who see nothing as out of their reach.
Make a conscious choice to do this. And if you don’t know anyone who’s got a big fat mind, go out and make some new friends. If you
stop at, “there’s no one like that around here,” that will be the truth and will set the wimpy tone for how you go about trying to manifest everything else into your life. How you do one thing is how you do everything. Get out there and find some people who make you feel like you can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Be clear on whom you want to meet and make a concerted effort to go meet them. Demand of The Universe to connect you with them, think of places where they might hang out or things they would do and insert yourself there. Being around inspired, visionary, enthusiastic people who are living their truths is one of the fastest ways to massively transform your life.
6. LOVE YOURSELF
Unless you have a better idea.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
—Shunryu Suzuki; Japanese Zen monk, author, teacher also lovingly known as the “Crooked Cucumber”
I know the big saying is “youth is wasted on the young,” but I think, in certain respects anyway, we’ve really got it going on in our late teens and early twenties. Aside from all the angst and drama and escorts home from the police, we’ve still got our little kid-like ability to create “just because” still firmly intact, but we’ve also got this newly-hatched adult ability to make big things happen in our lives. Add to this the fact that we’re not yet jaded by a long list of failures,
and are still under the vague impression that death is something that happens to other people, we, if you’re anything like me, leap into our lives when we’re young with an idiotic, yet awesome, disregard for “what-if’s.”
Admittedly, I remember doing things in the danger department that still have me sleeping with my light on when I think about them now: hanging out in sketchy parts of town with even sketchier people, stowing away on trains, taking enough LSD in one sitting to keep an entire village staring at their hands for hours, hiking off into the desert with no water, no map, and a canteen full of gin and tonics—my first priority being fun, with thoughts of the consequences trailing somewhere, if at all, far off in the distance.
But I also remember diving into my creative pursuits with the same reckless obliviousness and, as a result, getting utterly spectacular and thrilling results. Which is why I find it so odd to hear people say, “If I knew then what I know now, I’m not sure I would have done it.” Well thank God you didn’t know if that’s yer lame-o attitude. You’d be sitting next to a pile of empty beer cans, whining about how you missed out on going for your dreams if you did!
The problem is that once we’re older and “wiser,” many people trade in living fully in their purpose for more “grown-up” versions of life that range from the merely passable to the full-on sucking. They’ve bought into this idea that being responsible = not having fun anymore, that waking up feeling excited about life is for the young, and once we’re older, we need to trade that in, settle down and be more “realistic.”
Yawn.
I’m not talking about being an irresponsible jerk or doing the same things we did when we were younger, but I am talking about continuously living our dreams, no matter what stage of life we’re in, instead of settling for mediocrity because we don’t believe anything else is available or appropriate.
We only get to be in our bodies for a limited time, why not celebrate the journey instead of merely riding it out until it’s over?
We’re still allowed to dream, and our dreams are still available to us, but as we move through life, we must make the conscious effort to overcome whatever judgments we have, as well as kick all our fears from past experiences in the head, and participate in our own badassery. Whatever that looks like for us. We must focus on the positive instead of the list of negatives we’ve collected over time, and keep that focus regardless of what flies in our faces. And one of the best ways to do this is by reconnecting with our inner kids. I know how unacceptably dorky this may sound, but just stay with me here.
Even though you’re now most likely turned on by different things than you were as a youngster, you can still learn a lot from how you went about life in the old days. So think back: Was there ever a time where you felt totally in your groove? Where you created and did stuff just because it was fun without worrying about the outcome? Where you couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning and go do your thing? This could mean anything from when you were a little kid running around with a maxi pad stuck to your eye pretending to be a pirate to your senior year in high school when you got voted Class Clown for repeatedly charming your way past the ladies in the front office to make fake announcements over the loud speaker to that summer you learned to play the guitar without looking at your hands. When were you most turned on by life (and if you have yet to feel this way, stay tuned . . . ) and what can you learn from those experiences?
For me, one of the most exciting and on-purpose times in my life was when I was the singer-guitarist in a band called Crotch. I use the terms “singer,” “guitarist,” and “band,” all very loosely because we in Crotch weren’t concerned with things like learning to play our instruments
or practicing or any of that snooty musicianship crap. We had bigger fish to fry, like talking in loud voices about our band and checking ourselves out in plate glass windows as we walked by with guitars strapped to our backs.
Electric ones.
I started Crotch with this chick from work named Paula who’d never picked up a guitar in her life either, and who was as incapable of embracing her feminine side as I was. Paula and I were the kind of young ladies who prided ourselves on the wattage of our stereo equipment, our firm handshakes, and our ability to drink anyone in the room under the table.
The testosterone-fueled chip on my shoulder came from a high school career spent futilely awaiting a timely puberty while standing a good foot taller than everyone on earth, all the boys at my high school included. None of them ever asked me out, but I could make them laugh and kick their asses at basketball, so rather than fail at seducing them, I simply became one of them.
Paula’s issues were more homicidal in nature. She was the kind of angry found in highly intelligent women who develop the body of a Playboy bunny by the age of thirteen and are forced to grow up in the deep, redneck South. Within the first few months of starting the band, she traded in her long, raven locks for a fire-engine red buzz cut and covered her arms and back with tattoos of flames and dragons.