Expect blessings

Lately, I've been trying to practice gratitude and the sense of having enough, instead of resentment, envy and desire. I have a bad habit of looking around and seeing what I don't have and feel I deserve, rather than enjoying and being thankful for what I do have. I don't like this particular characteristic.

I also realized recently that I still have the fears of a 10-year-old in my dreams. When I sleep at night, I often have dreams that have an edge of fear, oppression, entrappment, themes of trying to escape someone or something scary but not being able to. I feel both of these emotions are linked to some part of my psyche or soul that is stuck and needs a kick in the pants to move beyond it, not just for growth, but for cultivating abundance (see, it's still about wanting!).

Here's what came to my email today, an excerpt from Rob Breszny's book "Pronia."


YOU'RE A PROPHET

With the authority vested in me by the little voice in my head, I'm pleased
to give you permission to add another job title to your résumé: prophet.

Am I being ironic? Only partially. The truth is, you generate numerous
predictions every day. The source is your imagination, which tirelessly
churns out visions of what you'll be doing in the future. The featured
oracle of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of
yourself devouring a fudge brownie in an hour or as monumental as a
fantasy of building your dream home in Hawaii.

Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned
with your deepest desires. Indeed, it's an indispensable tool in creating
the life you want; it's what you use to form images of the conditions
you'd like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests
on the material plane unless it first exists as a mental picture.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing.
You're just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at odds
with your conscious values. Fearful fantasies regularly pop up, many
disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. They
may hijack your psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end
meditations.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in your unconscious mind,
impelling you to want things that aren't good for you and that you don't
really need. Anytime you surrender to their allure, your imagination is
practicing a form of black magic.

These are the imagination's unsavory aspects, which Zen Buddhists
describe as the chatter of the "monkey mind." If you can stop locating
your sense of self in the endless surge of its slapdash fantasies, only then
might you be able to be here now and want what you actually have.

But whether your imagination is in service to your noble desires or in the
thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one
commonality: Its prophecies can be pretty accurate. Many of your visions
of the future do come to pass. The situations you expect to occur and
the experiences you rehearse and dwell on are often reflected back to you
as events that confirm your expectations.

Does that mean our mental projections create the future? Let's consider
that possibility. What if it's at least partially true that what we expect will
happen does tend to materialize? Here's the logical conclusion: It's
downright stupid and self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations
with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The
far more sensible approach is to expect blessings.

I hope I learn this lesson soon.