But don't think it came easy. We sacrificed money and nice things for a long time to only live off of one income, but when Sean and I got engaged I said, "This is the life I want one day. Are you with me? If you are, get with the program NOW before we get married, so I know that my plan can unfold. I will not marry a man that can't support a family without me." And I meant that. He knew I meant that when I postponed the wedding until he landed a job I was satisfied with. I gave him an out.
So he made his choice and got with the program. He made a career choice that didn't pay a lot at first but we knew he would be getting regular raises over those next few years. We adjusted our life solely to his income before I got pregnant to make sure we could do it, so when our first child came, our lifestyle didn’t take a dramatic blow. It wasn't easy seeing other friends our own age buy the nice new homes and nice cars while we were renting a tiny old house in the ghetto and driving older used vehicles that needed lots of work. It wasn't easy seeing our peers live in pretty big brick houses in nice restricted subdivisions when we bought our first house that is truly a starter house on a less than desirable street. But ya know what? We turned our little 1950 renovated wood frame house into a nice comfortable home, and I got to be there for my babies.
I didn't work my children into my lifestyle, rather I worked my lifestyle around my children because I didn't want someone else doing for my kids what I wanted to do myself. Our kids being raised by only their parents was far more important to us than me working so that we could afford a nicer house and material things.
Even once we were making enough money to increase our material things, we chose to use the increase primarily on food. We knew changing our eating habits to only whole organic foods was going to be an expensive transition, but once again, we were willing to sacrifice material possessions for the sake of our families health. And it has paid off tremendously. Sean and I understood that happiness doesn't increase by being able to "keep up with the Jones's" but primarily by establishing close functional relationships with the people that matter most and by being healthy and vibrant in both body and mind.
We have worked together over the last 3 years at making decisions that has brought Sean presently to a place in his career where he makes an income that's the equivalent of what many couples make together. Financially speaking, life has been gradually getting easier and easier over the years and just in the last year his income has literally been skyrocketing. We can now finally afford to live like many of our peers did a while back, and we didn't sacrifice what mattered most in order to get here. It took us longer to achieve, but we were willing to be patient for the sake of our kids and our marriage.
And now, because of the tough choices we made early on, I can live my dream. When the kids start school, painting, drawing and writing will be my full time job and I will STILL get to be a stay home mom. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am, and my excitement is growing still because Sean is in the process of starting his own business as well. It will take a year or two to get to a place where he can quit his regular full time job, but eventually he will be able to do just that, and then he can fully live his dream too, working from home doing exactly what he loves and is passionate about. We will both only answer to ourselves and each other and get to be together more and spend even more time with the kids.
So this has been the process of creating life the way we want it. I firmly believe in the law of attraction. I believe we attract negative or positive circumstances to us by the images and emotions we habitually think and feel. I believe having faith that what you want is already yours is what manifests it, but faith without works is dead. When you want something, are you not willing to work for it? If you truly believe what you want is on its way to you, then wouldn’t you take whatever steps are necessary to insure that you receive it as quickly and efficiently as possible?
I say this because there are many who want to be angry that my life is what I want it to be and theirs is not, but they fail to acknowledge that my life is happier and more successful than theirs because I have done things drastically different than they have. They can’t very well expect to have the same outcome as me when we have been living our lives differently since adolescents. It’s about choices.
A. You choose who you marry. That is not something you are forced into. You may FEEL forced, but you are not. It is your decision and only yours. And if you marry strictly because you accidentally conceived a child together, you must acknowledge that, once again, it was a CHOICE to sleep together before due time. An unplanned pregnancy is the consequence of your choice and you were old enough and knowledgeable enough to know it was a risk. Having a child on the way limits your immediate choices for your life and complicates it multiple times over. And if you choose to marry your child’s other parent for any other reason than love, you have complicated it even more. YOU and only you are responsible for your difficult life now.
B. You choose your lifestyle. Why do you think there are people who are filthy rich, but you would never know it because they live very modestly and give much of what they have? Just because you have lots of money doesn’t mean you have to max yourself out. If you have not learned the balance between spending and saving and what to spend and save for, you will suffer the consequences of that. And if you have landed yourself in tons of credit card debt, it’s because you were living well above your means, and no one but you can be blamed for that. Society doesn’t force you to keep up by making you feel like less if you can’t. Believe it or not, you do have the choice to give “society” the middle finger and do what you know is right and best for your individual life. You don’t have to convince anyone of what your priorities are. Just show me where you spend your money and I will tell you what your priorities are.
C. You choose how to raise your kids. You can insure that they will be happy, well behaved, independent, trustworthy, respectful kids. This is all determined by what kind of parent you CHOOSE to be… how consistent your discipline is, whether you neglected them or not, how much you made them feel loved, whether you made them top priority or not, and what kind of relationship they saw between you and their other parent.
D. You choose your career path. You choose your job. This is a tough one that many will argue is something that you just can’t help for whatever reason, and I’m here to say that whatever excuse you have, it isn’t so great that it won’t allow you to make a choice that will give you the most desirable end result. Depending on the family and social class you came from, it may be REAL hard work to do what you want to do, but is your happiness worth it? Or will you just give up and allow others to decide your future for you?
E. You choose whether to let others affect you or not. No one ever forced you to feel angry or depressed. Emotions may seem involuntary, but believe it or not, you can counteract a negative emotion by willing yourself to feel positive ones.
All of these areas of my life I paid very close attention to. I made sure I knew the man I chose to marry and that he met my most important standards. I made sure we were on the same page about important topics like parenting, religion and money before we even got engaged. When we faced rough patches in our relationship, I was determined to work them out. As hard as it was, I never gave up on my husband and on our marriage. I just kept fighting for what I knew I wanted. I was determined to reach my goals and I made sure my priorities were right. I put my kids and marriage first. I worked really hard. I sacrificed a lot for awhile. I showed endurance. I made a lot of wise choices, and when I made a lousy choice, I took responsibility for it, learned from it and kept moving forward.
There is no doubt something greater than me that makes all this possible and that I have gratitude for, for all the blessings that have been provided and doors that have been opened to me, but I do take credit for my life- both achievements and mistakes- because they were MY choices to make, and I made them. So if my life seems to be reaping more blessings and rewards than someone else, it is only because I did and continue to do things differently that they do. (As a side note, you should know that how blessed your life is has NOTHING to do with whether you are a Christian or not. If this was so then my life would have been richer in blessings when I was a diehard Christian than it is now. In fact, according to what many Christian denominations teach, my life should be lacking in blessings since denouncing Christianity, but on the contrary, my life is much happier and blessed since blowing off religion.) Maybe I have more endurance. Maybe I have higher standards for my life. Maybe it’s because I have always thought it better to learn from others mistakes rather than making my own. Or maybe it’s just because I have greater faith that the things I want out of life already belong to me. It’s quite possibly all of the above. Our lives are the sum of all our choices, and this includes our choice of how to think, so if you don’t particularly care for where you have ended up, know that you have yourself to thank for taking you there. This is going to piss some people off who don’t want to believe that the negativity in their lives is their fault. People can’t understand how things that involve other people doing something TO them are their fault. They also don’t understand how something that SEEMS out of their control, like failing health, or a terrible accident, or being laid off can be their fault.
And don’t misunderstand me… they might not be directly to blame. If they’re riding along on their bike and a Mack truck comes out of nowhere, runs a stop sign and pummels them down, obviously in that precise moment, the driver is the one at fault and should suffer the consequences for what he’s done to them. They definitely deserve compensation for their suffering. But if they would understand that their overall attitude about life and each individual moment to moment decision that is made literally FORMS their lives, they would then see that a deep shift in their way of thinking could have allowed them to avoid the accident altogether. Or maybe, just maybe, the truck hitting them set off a chain of events that can teach them a valuable lesson or bring a great blessing that could have only happened by something drastic happening, like being hit by a careless truck driver. Maybe they recover fully, and are awarded a very hefty sum from a law suit the ensued as a result of such a bad accident, leaving them with the money to do something that they previously wanted to do but couldn’t for lack of funds. You just never know. And that is why it is so important to make sure you approach each circumstance with positivity.
YOU can choose how you perceive life. “Bad” moments are not really bad if they help you grow in some way. It’s all in how you choose to view the situation. If you sit and mope and wallow in misery and do little to nothing because you have practically given up thinking it will do any good, don’t be surprised if you perpetuate your problems. If you focus your thoughts primarily on things that make you feel bad, don’t be surprised when the universe deals you more things that make you feel bad.
When you get stuck in an emotional rut or a chronic way of thinking about something (like you just have bad luck, or no one seems to like you) and you constantly reaffirm it to yourself, you are declaring to the Universe, God, Source Energy or whatever you want to call it, that that is how you WANT to feel and so it issues more things to make you feel more of that way. Negative angry people tend to attract negative angry circumstances and people. Sad and lonely people attract sad and lonely circumstances and people. On the same note, happy positive people will attract happy positive circumstances and people.
And this is actually good news because since you took yourself there, that means you can take yourself somewhere else. You are not at the mercy of the wind, being blown and tossed around without having any control over it. You are not subject to chance or luck. You CAN purposefully change your life around by renewing how you THINK.
My life was already generally turning out to be what I wanted it to be long before I ever recognized and believed the Law of Attraction simply because I have always been a day dreamer and a passionate person about what I wanted and believed in, but in a lot of ways my growth was stumped because of my religion. Christianity taught me that praying would deliver me a 50/50 shot at having my prayer answered based on whether it was God’s will or not. And because I didn’t know what God’s will was because I couldn’t know the future, I didn’t act on a lot of things for fear that it might not be God’s will, and I didn’t want to displease him and be punished for it. I spent much of my life just waiting for an answer and a door to open instead of making my own door. This way of thinking manifested in my life and slowed me down. It caused me to actually CAUSE many problems in my marriage and other relationships. It wasn’t until I walked away from organized religion, denounced Christianity, and actually believed what Jesus plainly said in the Bible, that I turned my life around. When I started having real genuine faith that the desires of my heart would be delivered to me, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude because it felt like they were already mine. I didn’t have to ask God for what I wanted anymore or to show me what his will was because I recognized that if I had real faith, asking and waiting for an answer was pointless. I started focusing my mind only on images I wanted to see in my life and stopped complaining and giving thought to my problems and the things I currently didn’t like about my life. I began practicing meditation to calm my mind, heighten my awareness, and release endorphins regularly. I began really believing that things were getting better and better with every new day. I told myself that. I told other people that. I repeated it over and over and over to the point that I probably ran it into the ground. But guess what? My life picked up speed. Gradually but quickly my life began having less of the things I didn’t like and more of the things I wanted. The Universe delivered to me all the people and circumstances that would contribute to my growth and my happiness, and when it was delivered, I acted on it. I took advantage of the opportunities when they arose and had faith they would carry be to the next great opportunity, and that’s exactly how it’s panned out.
Should I feel bad for my life being what I want it to be when so many others are disappointed with their own? When people get angry at me for having the kind of life they want to have, should I apologize for making right choices and being strong willed and having the faith that got me here? Or should I own it?
When I make a mistake, people expect me to own it and make it right, and I always do. In the same manner, I will own what I have done right. I will not give that credit to someone else. I am appreciative to any and every person that encouraged me to be better in my weaknesses, but honestly, there aren’t that many people out there I can give that credit to. My husband, my parents, and my sister are pretty much the only ones who have ever really offered encouraging words to me in the midst of my troublesome times, and even then, very little of it was genuine encouragement. It was mainly just criticism. I didn’t have anyone at all in my life that was cheering me on and telling me how I was going to push through it because I was strong or wise and the light was at the end of the tunnel. In fact, most of what I heard was how it’s ok to just give up if it was too difficult a fight or that it’s ok for me to be angry because I had every reason to be.
I’m sure it would have made it a lot easier if I had the me of today encouraging the me from the past, but I had nobody like that in my life. Nobody. I had to somehow find the strength and wisdom and courage in myself all on my own. And I was so damn determined to find it that I DID.
So when I see people’s lives in shambles- when I see their marriages and other relationships falling apart, kids unruly, physical and/or mental health going down the crapper, finances shot- and they are constantly blaming other people and their circumstances for why they aren’t happy, I just want to grab them and shake them. I want to stick them in a time machine and beam them into the past to view what I’ve been through and to see that I had every reason to throw up my hands and say “to hell with this!” At one point I almost seemed too far gone in my mind to be able to redeem myself. I was a nutcase with serious mental issues, and fortunately the only one who really knows the seriousness of this is my husband. He is the ONLY one who was subjected to my rage and psychotic breaks, and even when he didn’t know how to help me, I still managed to help myself because I WANTED to. I didn’t know exactly how at first, but I tried everything because I was desperate for change. And even he was completely amazed at my transformation in just a year’s time.
Is my life everything I want it to be today? No and yes. NO because there is so much more to become and attain, but YES because I am happy with where my heart for growth is today. I am satisfied with the fact that I am stronger, wiser, healthier and happier today than I was yesterday and the days prior, but I’m not fully content, for if I was I would feel no reason to keep progressing. I am not perfect, and I might not ever be, but I won’t let that stop me from aiming for perfection until the day I die.
The way I see it… if we don’t bother TRYING to be perfect because we are constantly telling ourselves it’s pointless because we will never be perfect, then that will simply cause ourselves to continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over. I for one DO believe it’s possible to achieve perfection. Is it a long shot? Maybe. But it’s a possibility. And as long as the possibility is there, that will be my goal. I will not beat myself up when I mess up because part of achieving perfection is understanding that it’s a process and you must make mistakes to learn, but as my life advances I know the mistakes I make will occur less and less because they MUST if you are really learning and growing.
I realize all this can be perceived as pompous and big headed by some people, and I don’t want to be viewed that way by anyone, but if taking credit for what I’ve done right is pompous, then so be it. If loving who I am and being happy with the way I’m creating my life is big headed then so be it. If talking about it seems like I’m rubbing it in people’s faces, I’m sorry, but that’s not what I’m trying to do. How selfish would it be for me to make all the right choices, create some amazing life for myself and go on my merry way without ever sharing the secret to my success with others?
Everyone is perfectly capable of living a life of greatness. Everyone has the potential. We need to stop coveting what others have. If you admire their life, great! Use where you are with what you have to start making the choices necessary for attaining a life more like theirs. We need to realize that life is fantastic right where we are at. Look around! You have more to be thankful for than you realize! You have a lot going for YOU. And my ultimate dream is that one day all of humanity will recognize thier potential and master a life of greatness.
Since I refuse to tell individuals how to live their personal lives, the only way to make a difference is to share the goodness of my own life with others. I learned the hard way that not getting heavily involved in others' personal affairs (even to help them) is the only peaceful way to live. What if EVERYONE just stopped trying to play God and fix everyone else and started focusing on bettering their OWN lives? Obviously snooping in others lives and judging what they do and how they live isn't getting humanity anywhere. You can either choose to be bitter and jealous of people who are happy, which is only going to hurt YOU, or you can get on board and start mastering your own life the way I did and actually benefit yourself. Life is a series of choices, and like all the rest, what you do with the time and resources you have today is YOUR choice.
