Podcast
Podcast Transcript
Everywhere I go it seems I encounter a chipmunk these days.
I’m not kidding. One lives on my back patio and it pops it’s head out to say hi often when I go out in the morning with my coffee. Last week, driving down my street three, yes three, chipmunks ran out in front of me. All at different times. Just now, as I was sitting in my office writing another podcast I just saw one on my neighbor’s porch. I decided to stop and see what in the heck is going on.
You see, I think Spirit or God talks to us in a variety of ways and one of those ways is by putting things in our path for us to notice. By noticing and listening and then wondering about those things is where we can get some real insight and direction. At least it has been for me. Things such as music lyrics that play over and over in our heads, or people or places that keep coming up in conversations, or in this case, chipmunks.
So, I went to the Goog and looked up chipmunks and what they might symbolize. The very first site I came to said that “Chipmunks symbolize that something good is on the way!” Woo-Hoo!!!! I’ll take that. It went on to say, "Chipmunk spirit animal is a symbol that something good is on it's ways to you, something wonderful that delights your heart something that makes you smile and laugh".
I immediately said, Hell Yeah! Something good is coming! And I did a little dance.
Reading on, it said, The Spirit of Chipmunk is very benevolent, granting wishes of the most treasured of our heart's desires.
Oh boy . . . I started to think about what I really wanted! My list of wants is never that far from the front of my mind.
Reading on it continued, Chipmunk is a totem of friendship. . . preparation and abundance. . .
Great. All three things I value! Friends, being prepared and woo-hoo to abundance.
Wow! I love all of that. And I love being reminded of this by all these precocious little chipmunks around me.
But in truth, does that mean something is different for me now that I’m seeing the chipmunks? Do the chipmunks know something I don’t know? Have the winds shifted, and greater, bigger things than usual are coming?
Or is good stuff always on its way and I simply forget to be prepared and living in expectation? Do I fail to live in possibility and anticipation and that’s what the chipmunks are here to tell me?
In today’s podcast we’re gonna talk a bit about goodness being there all the time and what we need to shift to see it as often as possible.
Why is it so easy to forget that good is just around the corner? Why is it easier to get in the habit of waiting for something negative to surface, to derail us or throw us off our game?
I’m really not sure, but I know that we humans are far more likely to be living cautiously, wincing when things are hard and expecting the worst. Maybe we were raised to prepare for hard times, a throw-back to the depression days. Perhaps we have left-over ideals from our Puritanical ancestors. Maybe it’s because fear has become our natural state. Maybe we as a people have over-focused on the negative and neglected looking for the positive. Just watch television and you can see evidence of this theory every day.
Or maybe it’s all of these.
Here’s what I do know. What we focus on is quite literally what we bring to us—what we attract. We’re like magnets attracting to us that which we think about. It’s a law. Quite literally the Law of Attraction in play.
The Law of Attraction states that things of like energy are drawn to each other. It’s indisputable. It’s why when you’re having a bad day with the consequential bad mood, bad stuff keeps happening. Things matching your energy keep coming to you like a magnet. It’s also why the opposite is also true. Like attracts like. Our thoughts and our feelings are quite literally what brings good to us or bad to us.
You would think with this knowledge and the mounds of evidence we have proving this over and over that we would carefully watch our thoughts and feelings and work hard to avoid the negative. You would think that we humans would choose happier thoughts over more negative thoughts. But we don’t.
Maybe we’re hard wired this way or just really anchored in this belief. I really don’t know. What I do know is that we have a choice and positive things are always there in our life. Goodness is always there for us if we want to see it. If we expect it and appreciate it. I believe, in my soul, the things we really want are always out there for us. I believe this despite the days that I too walk around waiting for the other shoe to fall, as the saying goes.
So how can we take this idea from my little chipmunks friends and “up” our game? How can we live like we expect this goodness to show up?
I have three ideas to do just that. So here we go.
Know What You Really Want
Number 1:
We’ve got to know what we really want. Literally. What do you want right now in your life? What, if it came, would make you say “Oh Boy!” and do a dance? Is it a prime parking space? What about a raise or more money? An extra $200 to go to a concert you’ve been trying to figure out how to pull off? What about an opportunity to go somewhere for a weekend? What do you want right now?
Or do you have bigger desires? It’s great to think big.
Is it a new and exciting relationship? What about to quit your job and start your own business? Or a pain-free body? A new car? To be debt free? A pair of jeans that doesn’t bind. I give you permission to think big. What do you want?
Knowing what you want is the only way you will know when it shows up. You’ve got to be super-duper clear about what you want. Trust me on this one.
Because, what if right in front of you is an opportunity for something that would be amazing, and you don’t even see it. Wouldn’t that be awful. Cause here’s the thing. We see what we train our brain to see. If we expect to see a lack of something or a negative, that’s what we see. We’re so, so powerful. But we can also train our brain to see the positive. Essentially, we decide what we will see and therefore have in our lives.
I want you to do an experiment today. I want you notice how many times you see tomatoes. I want you to notice tomatoes. You won’t have to look for them. They will come to you. Tomatoes will show up and you will notice them. I promise you. Tomatoes are in your future. I want you to want to see tomatoes. Got it?
I wager this experiment will show you just how easy it really is to see what you want to see.
So, the first step in having more goodness in your life is knowing what goodness is to you. You’ve got to know what you want so you can recognize it when it shows up. It begins by knowing exactly what you want. So I ask you again, what do you want?
Expect to See What You Want
Number 2: The second idea I want to throw at you is to live from a place of expectation.
That means you expect and plan to have what you want. I just told you that tomatoes are in your future. I told you to expect to see tomatoes today. I didn’t tell you to look for tomatoes.
That’s not really necessary. I’m asking you to expect to see them. That’s a subtle but powerful difference. Looking for something often requires longing and hunting and even foraging for what you want. But expecting to encounter what you want is way easier. It’s also all that is really necessary.
To live from a place of expecting to get what you want means being anchored in the knowing that what you want is there, is already there, and will appear. Those tomatoes I’ve told you to notice are already out there in the world. They are already in your future. They’re already on the sides of semi-trucks, part of billboard advertising, in pictures on menus. The tomatoes are there, I just want you to expect to see them.
Have Gratitude Even Before You Get What You Want
Number 3: Thirdly, to have more goodness we must have gratitude even before we have what we want.
You know what gratitude is. It’s a feeling of thankfulness. Easy but also easily overlooked. It must be practiced. But stay with me here. If the goodness you want is really inevitable, meaning its already there, then why not start having gratitude for it right now? Gratitude is like superfood for the soul. It’s like a kale salad, with avocado, walnuts, salmon and a side of dark chocolate. Super charged and power-packed!
Gratitude ups our game and makes us super magnetic for the things we want. Living from a place of gratitude speeds up the good stuff coming to us. Better relationships, better health, a more buoyant spirit . . . all the good stuff of life. Plus, it’s a much more pleasant place to live.
You begin by knowing what you want, what good things you really want in your life, then fully expect it to show up and start right now with a grateful heart. Right now, right this minute.
Cuz, the chipmunks told me to tell you that something good is on its ways to you, something wonderful that delights your heart something that makes you smile and laugh.
Did you get that? It’s true.
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