Attracting the Good

The Little House, my writing career & my writer's studio (above) were all part of the dream

In the past few months, I’ve received many notes about our achieving our dream in our Little House. Sometimes the notes and comments I’ve gotten from folks in email and through Mother Earth News say how our story has motivated them to make their own dreams reality. Other times, I’ve been asked exactly what steps we took to get here.

I give credit to getting here to The Law of Attraction, the power to will things into our lives.

Now, before you go thinking I’m off my rocker, believing in some woo-woo nonsense of making things appear through magical powers, I’m not, and it isn’t about magic.

The Law of Attraction isn’t about making things appear with a twitch of the nose or an “abracadabra,” or just by drawing or writing about your dreams, as it might have been interpreted in the best selling book and documentary, “The Secret.”

Our house sold within 7 days, to the 3rd looker, just as I had journaled

The Law of Attraction is about knowing what you want in your life, believing it will come to fruition, and taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves to make it a reality.

And yes, I do believe there is science behind it as well in Quantum Physics and Neuroplasticity.

My mother believed in the Law of Attraction and so, I really have been a believer, if not only just on a subconscious level, all of my life. In the neighborhood in which Dale and I grew up, having a lake home was “it,” and I’d wanted one for as long as I could remember.

In 2003, the opportunity to build a lake home on land my aunt initially bought with my uncle and mother presented itself to us.

As with being a full-time writer, I didn’t know how or when the dream of having a lake home would come true, but I knew enough to grasp both opportunities when they were presented in my life.

When we decided to make living here full-time a reality, my aunt had actually just brought me the DVD of “The Secret.” It was the week of my mother’s funeral and knowing I was devastated over that loss, my aunt wanted to remind me that my mother believed in the power of attraction. She wanted me to remember that my mom wouldn’t have wanted my dreams to stop because she was gone.

As I wrote above, I think there are a lot of things wrong in that book and DVD for people who didn’t have a basic understanding of The Law of Attraction. It relayed the message that attainment of your dreams and goals is quick and easy and it was based on too much commercial and material attainment and didn’t focus enough on the values of love and gratitude as part of the equation.

However, it did remind me of the basics of The Law of Attraction. That very spring I began journaling about how I envisioned our move. I still have the journal that outlines every detail including:

• Our house is only shown three times and sells within a week.
• Dale gets the job of his dreams by the fall. It is good paying and has benefits.

These things came true for us. Our house did sell exactly 7 days of being put on the market and was sold to the 3^rd couple that toured it and our move went smoothly. Dale did get the job he wanted at a major boat manufacturer and it was good paying and had benefits.

Of course, it wasn’t just journaling the specifics that made those things happen.

We took steps to ensure our goals were realized. We hired a great real estate agent with high sales results; we watched a million episodes of “Sell This House,” learning how to stage it to sell quickly, took advice from our real estate agent and worked our butts off on the house for 2 months prior to putting it on the market.

When I got here, I started making calls to the boat company to see what jobs they had available. We were both very surprised that they hired mechanics; we thought Dale would be taking an assembly job, not something he actually had skills for!

What putting our dreams down on paper did was crystallize my intention for our new life here, but we still had to take steps to make our dreams happen.

Now, if you’ve been reading “Living Large” for a while, you know that things starting going askew about a year after our move.

It’s taken me a little while to read and do research, going deeper than what “The Secret” lined out about The Law of Attraction to figure out how to get us back on course.

On Wednesday, I’ll talk about the mistakes we made and how we began attracting things we didn’t want into our lives, as well as having a guest who has written a book on it (hint: There’s a book giveaway in there!)

Do you know anything about The Law of Attraction? Do you think there’s something to it, or just fantasy? Have you used it in your own life? How?