Back in black...

Remember how I mentioned that I was hoping for a new black MacBook so that I could work outside of my (admittedly beautiful) living room office?

A herd of kool-aid drinking apple gnomes are assembling it now and it should be making its way around the globe to me soon!

Which brings me to something that I heard talked about quite frequently in Maui: 'manifestation' ... Viewers of the movie 'The Secret' or listeners to Tony Robbins and a half-dozen over inspirational or motivational speakers (including my friend and former Body-for-Life cohort Bob Doyle, who incidentally also appears in 'The Secret') talk about it, maybe in different terms, but it's always the same idea: Know what you want and set about making conditions in yourself and in your life favorable to receiving what you want, and you will get it.

Jess and I heard this message over and over again while we lived in Maui, but neither of us really took it seriously until we decided to move back to Boston; within weeks of our decision - even before we'd made our decision public to our families and our friends, pieces of the puzzle fell back into place.

Suddenly, I connected with Brian and Aaron and found myself interviewing to become a part of Zaadz - a dream job for me, Jess's family offered her a car, she was offered a teaching position at a well-known Boston studio (which later fell through, but it turned out to be better that way) and a place for us to stay. We were very easily able to move back to Boston on the cost of mailing our boxes and food along the way; even our plane tickets cost us less than $100!

The weird thing about manifestation is that you can't not expect it to happen and have it happen, but nor can you just expect magic to occur if you don't create the necessary conditions. Personally, I'm not accustomed to having so many good things happen to me in such a short time, so it's been a hard trip moving from 'When is the other shoe going to drop?' to 'How am I helping create this bounty?' But that's what it's about; it's about gratitude and really respecting what I'm creating in my life, and realizing that manifestation neither a passive process nor is it something I can ultimately control - at least not in the ways I'm accustomed.

The other thing I realized, while talking with Jess the other day: manifestation doesn't work for ephemeral things, like emotions. You can't manifest emotions. You have to ask yourself - what do I need in my life to feel this way? Sometimes that means physical objects, or a certain job or a certain person... But in creating a mindset, there are two major methods: feel it from within, create the emotion first, or create the conditions that you believe will bring about that mindset. Indeed - just envisioning the things that will put you in a certain mindset often put you at least halfway there.