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Horizons Magazine

More about Andrea

DECEMBER 2002 
Retreat home in Smokey Mountains, get clear before you take action,
if the money didn't matter what would you do? Credit card woes and
getting debt-free, finding a spiritual partner, keeping dollars separate
in a relationship, distorted self-perception, everything is subject to change, you can always choose again.

Hello and welcome to the December 2002 issue of Horizons Magazine. Wow, here we are at the end of another year. As you look back on the last 12 months, I hope you achieved lotsa what you set out to do - I know I did.

One of the things I did this year was to sell my second home in North Carolina, which was bought as a retreat home to share with friends. The first year I had it, I went up for a week or more each month to play in the Smokey Mountains and take a break from my work-work-work schedule. Of course, I worked from there also - when you're a one person business, you hafta work a lil each day - but I mostly goofed off. I caught up on reading and did lotsa writing; I hiked and wandered through the national parks. It was nice having the cell phone not work in the mountains, so my hourly urge to check phone messages was tempered. I've gotten very used to checking phone messages while I?m driving - which is often - and it saves me lotsa time if I can check messages and return calls when I travel. Modern technology has made it possible for me to work and make a living anywhere I can have a phone line and a computer. I?m so blessed, I can hardly call it work.

The second year I had the home in North Carolina, I didn't go up so often, and I rented it on a weekly basis to friends. I knew I could go up anytime, so I procrastinated and spent less and less time there. The third year, I had the car accident and spent an entire year not going up. By the time I recovered from my injuries, my enthusiasm for the place had waned. I?d been successful in keeping it rented often enough to offset my annual costs, but I was ready to let it go. It was a year long process to convince myself to sell it, and I was holding onto it under the guise that I might wanna keep it available for friends.

I did some creat-ive visualization work to prepave selling it at a good profit, and being ready to let it go when it came time to close. When I finally put it on the market, I priced it $18,000 higher than I paid for it. I thought if I had an offer at that price, that was my signal that I should sell it. I kid you not, shortly thereafter, I had an offer which was negotiated to just $1,000 short of the listing price. That was when I discovered that I wasn't ready to sell it after all. I took it off the market, and when interest rates fell, I refinanced it to get a much better mortgage rate.

My indecision over selling the home manifested in a refinance application process that lasted over 6 months, and consumed much of my time and energy. As I?m self employed, I had to produce reams of paperwork to verify income and, thanks to my confusion and lack of clarity over my intent with the property, I reached vibrational harmony with lotsa wasted time and effort, thus causing all paperwork to have to be produced 3 times, since the first 2 times it got lost. As soon as I remembered that I am always in charge of what I attract, and that it's always about vibrational matching, I stopped in my tracks. I knew that unless I wanted to continue encountering confusion and resistance, I had to take time right now to get clear on exactly what I wanted.

I went up and spent some retreat time on the property alone, with the express purpose of meditating upon it and clarifying my intent with it. A lot of emotions came up. I?d bought the home with the proceeds of selling my mom's house after her death in 1996, and it was filled with many of her belongings. Mom's sister, my favorite Aunt Leslie, lived just 10 minutes away. Our family spent lotsa time in my youth, camping in the Smokey Mountains. I felt at home there, and I liked having my own home there. I liked the cool weather and I liked sitting on my own porch in my own rocking chair, listening to my own creek on my own acreage, and seeing nothing but woods around me.

I also thought about the fact that I was no longer making it a priority to spend time there. Often it seemed like more of a chore than a vacation, and I?d delay going for months and months. I tend to consider questions in the light of if the money didn't matter, what would I do? My dilemma was that I was making money with it as a vacation rental, yet I didn't want to be concerned with the upkeep of it. If the money didn't matter, I was ready to let it go. If the money didn't matter, I knew I could find something else I liked better, if and when the time came. If the money didn't matter, I realized that I would be just as happy renting a private cabin on a weekly or monthly basis whenever the mood struck me. I realized I didn't hafta be committed to owning a place in order to enjoy it.
Once I made this decision, I put it back on the market, and priced it $15,000 higher than I'd paid for it. The refinance went through right away, and the home sold shortly thereafter, for the listing price. Once I'd carefully thought out and clarified exactly what I wanted, it happened very quickly, and I was happy with my decision. Interesting how that always works out! When I get clear on just one issue in my life, clarity shows up in other areas of my life as well.

As soon as I had that major decision behind me, it became easier to get clear in other areas. I applied to refinance my home here in Florida, and this time it went much easier. Nothing had changed between this refinance and the last, except me getting clear on what I wanted. I called my local First Union, since they had all my personal and banking records for the past 2 dozen years, and I talked to someone I knew. Vernon (congrats new dad!) took my application over the phone, and within a month I?d closed, with zero paperwork production on my part.

I took the opportunity to pay off a few thousand dollars in credit card debt, and felt much freer and lighter. I'm not a big shopper and I rarely use credit cards, so Office Depot was my highest payoff at over $2,000. I feel blessed to have no debt except my home and van, because I have friends who have $30,000 - $75,000 in credit card debt *yikes* Of course, these same friends have the latest computer equipment and the newest electronic toys and a much more social lifestyle than I do. They also earn less income and, interestingly, they also talk lots about how money is tight.

It reminds me when I made lots less income in my 30's and I had to have the newest everything. Even if it was a hardship to get it. Having said that, my credit card debt back then never exceeded $5,000, although at that time it seemed like a whole lot. I bought lots more clothes back then, and they often ended up in the back of my closet, unworn. A few years of that and I caught on that I was shopping to fill something within me, something that was never filled by shopping. I'm glad I got the lesson early. I?m excited now, I love having everything paid off - it's like having a fresh start... infinite potential! Now I'm getting excited about saving up a nest egg, and it'll be fun to see how much I can get it to grow and to plan really fun things with it.

A few of the couples I know who are on the credit-card-go-round tend to place the blame for their financial woes on the spending habits of their partner. They can't understand how they can have a partner who is so irresponsible. Some of them have specific ideas on how much income their partner should earn as well. My thoughts on that are - always keep dollars separate in a relationship. That way it's never about money. I used to joke and say that the way to have a successful relationship is to keep sex and dollars out of it - those are the only topics that are ever argued about. Many a truth is said in jest!

To those who point the finger at their partner for their lack of financial acumen, I say - how do you think you attracted this person, who has so many qualities you judge? Since like attracts like or, more appropriately said, since we attract our experience to us by virtue of our thoughts, what have you been thinking about that attracted this person to you and that keeps this person in your experience?

In much of the counseling I do, many ask me  "Why can't I find a partner who thinks like I do? Why are all the men so selfish? I can't find a spiritual man, there are none around. They're all hypocrites or they're players or they have no ambition or are afraid of commitment."

Since we see the world through a filter of who WE are, we might ask ourselves why these are the types of men we attract into our lives. You're either attracting others who are just like you - vibrational match and all that - or you're attracting more of what you've been spending your time thinking about and focusing on.

I see spiritual men everywhere I go, and I sit next to them at church and at discussion groups and conferences all the time. Lots of these are the same men I've heard others complain about. I have great discussions with these guys and don't find any faults with them. I know we each bring out different parts of our friends? personalities, so it's entirely possible for me to have a different 'take? on someone that another does. But then I?m not looking at them with any hidden agenda, such as is he movie star handsome, what kinda car does he drive, will this be the one I marry, does he earn enough money to support me, will he be a good father to my children...
Once I learned that if I make enough money to support myself, I'll have absolute freedom, I trained for a good job and stopped pooling dollars in a relationship. My idea now is that I enjoy living alone, so I see no need to cohabit with anyone. If I was seeking a relationship, I?d like him to be financially self sufficient, with enough income to do the kind of things I like to do, so we can do them together. I?d like him to have a flexible work schedule so he could travel with me sometimes. I?d like him to enjoy having his own place, and to respect my privacy just as I?d respect his. I?d look to him for companionship and fun, and not to fulfill any emptiness I might have inside, or to make up for my deficiencies. If he lost his job, I?d hope he was responsible enough and clever enough to get another means of income going, or that he?d make some preparation for it in advance.
My point is, I believe I attract people into my experience based on how I see myself, people who have much the same strengths and weaknesses I do. I believe we all attract into our experience the people who are most like we see ourselves. But the question is - how do you see yourself?

I'm rereading a book from 1975 called The Structure of Magic. It's about the therapeutic effects of language and what has come to be known as neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and how we get programmed by the language we use and how our perception is programmed and distorted by what we're taught is 'the norm.' It's one reason I try to be mindful about the written and spoken word - I've learned the power of it. A good example is someone who is a really neat and valuable person, like my friend Anna Marie, but has been programmed to believe she's a loser, so she acts like she's a loser and all her talk about being a loser finally gets to you and you hafta cut her off. She can't get past apologizing for imagined deficiencies and pretty soon you're tired of hearing it because she's convinced you to start seeing her thru her own filter, which isn't a pretty picture.

The book asks: ?How is it possible for different human beings faced with the same world to have such different experiences? Our understanding is that this difference follows primarily from differences in (the model they grew up with.) Thus, the question becomes: How is it possible for human beings to maintain an impoverished model which causes them pain in the face of a multi-valued, rich and complex world? The difficulty is not that they are making the wrong choice, but that they do not have enough choices - because they don't have a wide and richly focused image of the world. One mechanism which we can use either to cope effectively or to defeat ourselves is Deletion. Deletion is a process by which we selectively pay attention to certain dimensions of our experience and exclude others. Deletion reduces the world to proportions which we feel capable of handling. The reduction may be useful in some contexts and yet be the source of pain for us in others."

My friend Anna Marie distorted and deleted my perception of her so much that it changed how I felt and I no longer wanted to be around her. She quit a 5 year job she detested, and instead of going right out to find another, she thought she'd take it easy and see what else came her way. During this time, she didn't look for a job, although she had house and car payments to be made. When she finally got in such dire straights that she was in danger of being foreclosed on, I asked her why she didn't go apply to work at Home Depot or WalMart or one of them. She said she couldn't, because they drug tested and it would show up that she smoked pot. I asked her how she felt about the consequences of prioritizing buying pot instead of paying her mortgage, or instead of cleaning up her system so she could pass a drug test. She shrugged and said, "I dunno." This isn't a 14 year old, this woman is 42 years old. She'd allowed herself to be devastated by losing a job she quit in the first place. It was the only 'real' job she'd ever had.

I told her, it doesn't hafta feel so final, like it's only one event and then it's over. Life is a process and it's helpful to look at it as an ongoing process. You'll have lotsa chances to reconsider decisions about where to work.
It took years for me to realize that I wasn't gonna just have one job or one career, (or one man, or one apartment, or one car or one pet.) When I first began to see that everything was apt to change every couple of years, at first it frightened me and made me feel insecure. ?Oh, no, how will I live? Will I end up being a bag lady? Will I hafta have some man support me??

I also began to look at it as a temporary thing, which also made me afraid and insecure. At first. Then I began appreciating more and feeling more grateful for what I had when I had it. When I went lotsa years later from me being scared because things were temporary, to me feeling hopeful things were temporary, I began to feel more free and relaxed, which ultimately helped me attract a better experience each next time. There will always be lotsa of chances to reconsider your decisions and make better ones whenever you feel it's time. You can always choose again.

The problem is seldom that we don't have the correct vision of what we want, the problem is that we hold ourselves back from our good by our resistant thoughts on other topics. How do resistant thoughts about family and rent and future housing affect the kinda job you attract? Who knows how, I stopped caring ?how,? but my experience is that it does. I had to ?get right? with lotsa things in my life before I had the relatively easy flowing life I have now. Each time I thought I'd gotten clear, I was called back to the battlefront again to face something I?d overlooked and needed to work through again. I was real slow in getting it. I still am sometimes.

I suggested to Anna Marie that meditation might be helpful and she countered that she didn't think it was possible to meditate yourself out of a situation, otherwise no one would have died in concentration camps, and people around the world wouldn't be starving. I told her that wasn't what I was suggesting. I told her meditation is just a daily practice to relax and release resistant thought a couple of times a day. Meditation doesn't replace action, it doesn't replace anything. Concentration camps and starving communities take a lot of mass consciousness pre-paving to get to that crisis point. You don't meditate anything away. If you meditate regularly, you're more likely to have organized thoughts; and if you have organized thoughts, you're more likely to have less uncertainty; and if you have less uncertainty, you have less fear; and if you have less fear, you have more trust; and if you have more trust, you'll be directed to true guidance; and when you're connected to true guidance, you feel empowered; and when you feel empowered, you empower others - and a community of empowered individuals does not get led to concentration camps and they will find a way to feed themselves.

In this issue, we have an Introduction To Kriya Yoga by Roy Eugene Davis. Mr. Davis writes more clearly on practical spirituality than anyone else I've ever read, and he uses language that is clear, concise and absolutely understandable. No new age rhetoric here - just simple steps that can improve your quality of life forever.

And that's been my hope with Horizons Magazine these past 10 years. To give you simple, do-able steps that improve your quality of life, and encourage you to be more fully who you came here to be. Thank you to all our readers and advertisers. Without your loving support, Horizons Magazine would not have become Florida's most popular holistic publication. Thank you for being part of my life and helping make my dreams come true. Enjoy our offering this month. Hari Om.