Just my luck!

This past Sunday my husband's car broke down. He drove it to the store to buy yours truly a bottle of wine, and when he came out of the store it wouldn't start. I felt a teeny bit bad that this happened when he was doing me a favor, but luckily the wine helped numb my guilty conscience :)


Anyhow, after I picked him up (he was only about a mile away), we did some google research on the symptoms, and were a little discouraged as a fairly expensive problem seemed to keep getting mentioned as the probable culprit. However, I decided I wouldn't worry about it. My car is newer, under warranty and runs great. If this turned out to be something we could not afford to fix right away, thank goodness for my vehicle. I also decided to feel grateful for his car and the good fortune we have had with it- It was a gift from my mother and father in law. It's ten years old, but has only 65,000 miles on it. We have not had any repair costs on it, just oil changes, etc.. in the two years we have had it. I told myself these things a few times, then tossed the whole thing out of my mind.


Monday morning we had it towed (which was covered by insurance, and another pleasant surprise as we didn't think we had this coverage) and were told that afternoon that it was a small part and our bill was $128 total.  We were both happy and grateful.


This situation could be just as easily looked at in a negative light. We could have chosen to be upset that it happened to us, especially when our finances are not great, but what good would that do?


I've decided that this was "just my luck" and that's a good thing!

The importance of being grateful.

Manifesting wealth is an interesting activity to me. I've got a troubled relationship with money. I'm sure this stems from hearing so much about how we couldn't afford things when I was young. What's funny is that while we didn't have a ton of money, we were probably just fine. I know we were never on public assistance, I don't remember once eating horrible cheap meat. I never ate ramen (unless I wanted to :)) We still went on vacations, albeit we had to go to places where my dad had a business convention so we could stay in the hotel for free. Had our attitude been one of thankfulness for what we did have, as opposed to concentrating on our lack of extras, my relationship with money might be very different.


People who believe that money should be in their lives somehow manage to allow it in no matter what.  Have you ever known someone who declared bankruptcy or had a business go under, yet they still seemed to live in a nice house? I know one family who filed bankruptcy and lost their house, only to move into another really nice house, but this time they lived in a neighborhood instead of on horse property. Even their "broke" house was better than mine!


I've been working really hard on changing my relationship with money. I have always been taught or perhaps just always felt, that longing for money is greedy, sad, and shallow.  I am realizing now that if I see myself as someone who is good with money and someone who deserves to have a lot of it, that's okay.


Working on manifesting wealth at this time in my life is extra challenging. My husband's career is very unstable, but he is passionate about it. I want to support him in his dream, and while we certainly haven't become rich, his jobs in this field have afforded us many other benefits- living in different parts of the country, meeting so many interesting and varied people, traveling and living all over the world.  Unfortunately, it is common for him to be between jobs, which is where we currently are.


I know that a big part of LOA is visualizing yourself having wealth and pretending and acting as though you have it. Really though, I cannot pretend we have the money for me to just go to the mall and buy some new shoes (one of my favorite things to do, by the way.) Going to the mall right now would cause me to have a lot of negative and stressful vibrations going out.  What I can do is use a combination of gratitude, hard work and faith that good things will come to me. I think that often times people are discouraged with the Law of Attraction because they will visualize and wish for things, yet those things do not manifest.  You know the old saying "God helps those who help themselves?" You can replace the word "God" with the phrase "law of attraction" and it still holds true.


Every day, throughout the day, I look  around me and say thank you for all the things I have that I enjoy.  I've been doing this so much that it's really become so easy to find things. While I was folding laundry the other night, without even blinking an eye, I noticed how many nice clothes my daughter has, and was thankful that she has such nice clothes. I have no need to shop for her right now. I REALLY hate folding clothes, so for me to find a way to be thankful for anything during this dreary task is quite a testament to my gratitude skills.  I've been thankful the grocery store had the kind of chips I like on sale, thankful for my ipad, thankful for my computer.


In the summer of 2009 I was working in my field (social work), and my job was terrible. I was so depressed. People were quitting, getting fired, I was in trouble for a decision I made about a child that I did not believe was wrong. At the time my husband didn't have a job, so I really couldn't quit without finding something else first. Every day in my gratitude journal (an iphone app) I listed my job as something I was thankful for. It actually made me depressed to be thankful for it, but I was trying my best to like my job. It was a mix of "if I say I love it, maybe I will", and true gratitude because we really needed that job.


Anyway- fast forward to December 2009, my husband gets a great job overseas, in March of 2010 I quit my job and was thrilled. Then, this last December comes and my good friend from work emails me that they've made changes to our unit, and it has been going really well and I should consider coming back and picking up some shifts when I come back to America (which I thought was going to be in March or April of this year.)  A few weeks later I'm home, and I have a job again (start February 1st!), doing the same thing, but this time it's better. I really believe it was my being thankful for  the job in the first place, and being thankful for what I have that made me able to go back to this job so easily. I'm super grateful to have this job without having to interview or anything. That is LOA for sure.

LOA when you're sick is no fun...

Every member of my family has come down with the flu one after the other for the past week.  I was really excited to start journaling and doing the exercises from "The Attraction Distraction", but it's had to wait. I was able to find some awesome forums and message boards. One of the reasons I wanted to start blogging my journey was because most of the LOA and positive thinking blogs out there are written by people who have already become "experts" at LOA and are now life coaches. They are wonderful blogs, and I'm following several, but I would love to read about others who are still novices, trying to figure out how to become true practitioners.

I thought I would share a small success story regarding LOA. When we were in Asia last month and found out we were coming home, we also found out that our team was not going to honor our contract, which included a severance package. I had just read most of Rhonda Byrnes book, The Power, which goes into detail about gratitude for what one does have. She stresses the importance of being grateful for everything we have and not getting into a place of focusing on our lack of things or want of things.

I made the decision that we would not stress about what we did not have. I looked at the money we had earned and declared my gratitude for it. As soon as we got back to the States, I began to go through our mail from the past few months. In the large pile were two insurance checks, which were dividends from some class action lawsuit. There was also our reminder that our vehicle registration was due at the end of this month. I do believe this is the law of attraction at work. Getting the vehicle registration bill was certain to have given me anxiety, but those two checks, even though they were not huge, they helped offset the cost of the registration renewal, and why wouldn't I be grateful for that?

We had two other positive financial LOA examples that I will post about later. Right now I need to get some sleep. I'm hoping this flu goes easy on me. I want to get to work on manifesting good things.