Hello again…I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter with friends and family!
Here is a great song to set the tone for today’s Blog:
Since my last post, I have gotten a haircut, and started going back to Church…Easter Sunday…very fitting day indeed! I have stopped watching TV…partly because I am so busy now…but mostly because I have realized that constantly being bombarded with all that negative stuff is contrary to The Secret, and definitely does have an effect on us…especially the News! I’ve finally been able to get some sleep…slept great last night! As a word of caution…don’t do what I did with regards to the subliminal message programs and the MP3’s - both playing at the same time…I think I OD’d on them…which probably did contribute to my not being able to sleep. I did learn from Mindmaster that, “YES selecting all the programs will be too many. Think of your mind as a laser. The more focused the better.”
By the way, many times while lying in bed awake all night long, I would see some fantastic light shows, and weird designs in my mind, while my eyes were closed. Here is one example of the light show I would see…they would be moving, and the colors would be so vivid and bright: See “Aurora Borealis 2011” in top right margin.
I have wondered many things since this journey began for me. I wondered, “Why me?” for one. Through all my down days, I did continue to pray at least twice a day… every day. One of the things I ask God each morning is: “Please help each one of us today, please be at work in our lives, please direct our steps, and fill each one of us with your Holy Spirit.” I am here to tell you that God does indeed answer our prayers! I also was thanking God constantly for any and every good thing that happened to me each day.
Everything seemed (to me anyway) so bad; and I was so grateful when something good did happen…even if it was something like dropping a glass bottle that didn’t break when it hit the floor. Thanking God became a habit…thanking Him for my food at each meal, for not getting caught in a downpour or snow storm when I had to go outside…for no line at the checkout counter…you name it…so I had no need for a “Gratitude Rock”…being grateful was not a problem that I had trouble remembering!
And while I am on this subject…and yet another example of the “Law of Attraction” at work in my life…this email, titled “The Amazing Power of Gratitude” sent to me by Tony Dosanjh, showed up in my inbox the other day:
The Radical Power of Gratitude
By Margot Zaher and Jafree Ozwald
By Margot Zaher and Jafree Ozwald
Every time you give thanks for how the Universe has blessed you, you send out a high vibration energy that starts magnetizing even more love, joy and abundance into your life. Gratitude is one of the most powerful and transformational energies on the planet. Whenever you are grateful, your body starts bathing in the energy of joy and abundance. You ignite a deeper knowingness that you are truly fulfilled and lack nothing at all. Your energy naturally becomes peaceful, content and loving. Your being simply becomes a gift to others who may feel a sense of lack inside. Our inner world manifests into our outer world, and choosing gratitude is what allows you to help this world to heal and open its infinite reservoirs of loving, co-creative energy.
"At any moment, you have a choice, that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it." ~Thich Nhat Hanh
The amazing thing about gratitude is that you cannot experience fear, scarcity, or doubt when you are in it. By simply being thankful for what is, you instantly relieve yourself from all internal suffering and can begin to know your soul's real path and mission here. Deep deep down you are already divinely blessed with a great power. You were born with the divine connection and resources to manifest anything and everything that you need. From recognizing this blessed place within, you become a massive magnet for attracting even more love, success, and divine relationships into your life. Take a few moments here to simply imagine what your life will look and FEEL like when you are constantly grateful for what is. By practicing imagining you are living in gratitude, you automatically become more receptive towards the divinity that is already deeper within you.
For the next 24 hours, we invite you to do something truly radical and out of the ordinary. We want you to explore what it is like to continuously dive into gratitude. Make this day 100% dedicated to thanking the Universe. Give thanks to the sun that shines, the clouds that give you moisture, a friend that you have, your eyes, hands, and your ability to read and learn. You have been blessed with air to breathe and food to keep you alive. Say to yourself or out loud, "I am so thankful for my life!" Let these words sink deeply into the cells of your body. Let them penetrate you to the core. It is truly mind boggling how good it feels just to let in a little bit of gratefulness.
"God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say thank you?" ~William A. Ward
Where this invitation becomes radically powerful is when you practice being thankful to everyone that you cannot appreciate or be thankful for. These beings are teachers for you on your path nudging you to step more fully into your own power and truth. Thank them for this gift they are giving you! We are all fortunate to be alive, and partake of all of the amazing experiences that come our way. As you continuously practice giving thanks for those things you typically complain about, you will feel a great lightness overtake your life. You will naturally feel your energy expand and you will be filled with more joy and bliss than before. As you say "Thank You" to everything in your life that you were once unappreciative of, your body starts magnetizing even more abundance into your life. Gratitude essentially opens up the channels for abundance, allowing you to more easily receive the incredible gifts that the Universe has to offer. As you partake in this thankful habit you will always recognize the depth and beauty of your life and consciously see the blessings that each experience contains.
"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice." ~Meister Eckhart
"At any moment, you have a choice, that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it." ~Thich Nhat Hanh
The amazing thing about gratitude is that you cannot experience fear, scarcity, or doubt when you are in it. By simply being thankful for what is, you instantly relieve yourself from all internal suffering and can begin to know your soul's real path and mission here. Deep deep down you are already divinely blessed with a great power. You were born with the divine connection and resources to manifest anything and everything that you need. From recognizing this blessed place within, you become a massive magnet for attracting even more love, success, and divine relationships into your life. Take a few moments here to simply imagine what your life will look and FEEL like when you are constantly grateful for what is. By practicing imagining you are living in gratitude, you automatically become more receptive towards the divinity that is already deeper within you.
For the next 24 hours, we invite you to do something truly radical and out of the ordinary. We want you to explore what it is like to continuously dive into gratitude. Make this day 100% dedicated to thanking the Universe. Give thanks to the sun that shines, the clouds that give you moisture, a friend that you have, your eyes, hands, and your ability to read and learn. You have been blessed with air to breathe and food to keep you alive. Say to yourself or out loud, "I am so thankful for my life!" Let these words sink deeply into the cells of your body. Let them penetrate you to the core. It is truly mind boggling how good it feels just to let in a little bit of gratefulness.
"God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say thank you?" ~William A. Ward
Where this invitation becomes radically powerful is when you practice being thankful to everyone that you cannot appreciate or be thankful for. These beings are teachers for you on your path nudging you to step more fully into your own power and truth. Thank them for this gift they are giving you! We are all fortunate to be alive, and partake of all of the amazing experiences that come our way. As you continuously practice giving thanks for those things you typically complain about, you will feel a great lightness overtake your life. You will naturally feel your energy expand and you will be filled with more joy and bliss than before. As you say "Thank You" to everything in your life that you were once unappreciative of, your body starts magnetizing even more abundance into your life. Gratitude essentially opens up the channels for abundance, allowing you to more easily receive the incredible gifts that the Universe has to offer. As you partake in this thankful habit you will always recognize the depth and beauty of your life and consciously see the blessings that each experience contains.
"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice." ~Meister Eckhart
Whoa! I couldn’t have said it any better than that! Again, this is nothing new…this message is very prominent throughout the Bible!
I find it interesting, that on the Johnny Nash YouTube video, 4,014 liked it, and 63 people did not like it…and on the YouTube clip of Oprah telling Larry King about “the moment that absolutely changed my life forever”…1,950 liked it, while 555 disliked it. These (the 63 and the 555) are exactly the kind of people who need to learn the power of “The Secret”! Before his ‘fall”, Tiger Woods won almost every tournament he entered…since then, I don’t think he has won any (don’t quote me on that, as I did not take the time to look it up). I can’t even imagine what Tiger Woods, with all his natural talent and abilities, would be like if learned and applied The Secret!
Since I started this journey, four people have told me that they had seen The Secret years ago. I wish I had known about it a long time ago…might have saved me a lot of grief! But I guess, “To everything there is a season.”
(Trivia note:) "Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There Is a Season)", often abbreviated to "Turn! Turn! Turn!", is a song adapted entirely from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible (with the exception of the last line) and put to music by Pete Seeger in 1959. Seeger waited until 1962 to record his own version of it, releasing the song on his The Bitter and the Sweet album on Columbia Records.[1] 45% of the royalties for the song are donated to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, because, in Seeger's own words, "[in addition to the music] I did write six words."[2] The song became an international hit in late 1965, when it was covered by The Byrds, reaching #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and #26 on the UK Singles Chart. Thus, the song easily holds the record as the #1 song with the oldest lyrics. The lyrics are taken almost verbatim from the Book of Ecclesiastes, as found in the King James Version (1611) of the Bible[3](Ecclesiastes 3:1), though the sequence of the words was rearranged for the song. Ecclesiastes is traditionally ascribed to King Solomon.
Before I go, I want to leave you with a testimonial that my friend, Ken emailed to me after reading my first post because of all the similarities:
How I Found Peace with God
I was driving down a rural highway in north central Wisconsin that Autumn night in 1977, thoughts running wildly through my mind. "Why wasn't I dead?" I thought unbelievingly. I had fully intended to overdose on drugs and end my life just hours before. But after swallowing some one hundred assorted pills that I thought were pretty potent, I woke up surprised not only to find myself alive, but my head clear also. Didn't even catch a buzz!
As a senior in high school, I was hanging around with the wrong crowd, and heavily into the drug culture. My parents being divorced when I was young, I had tried living with both sets of parents and couldn't get along with either one. I didn't strike it off too well with girls either, so with one failed relationship after another, I had decided that death was preferable to life, thinking that somehow it would be a gateway to a better life.
But now I was confused, off balance. Overdosing on drugs seemed like the easiest most painless way of ending my life, and when I decided to finally go through with it, there was no turning back. The thought never occurred to me that I would not succeed. So there I was back in my car driving down a rural highway pondering what to do next. I remembered a junior high teacher once reading an article to our class about a guy who killed himself instantly by driving his car 55 mph into a telephone pole. That was it! It would be instantaneous; painless.
There was one problem, however. As I drove down this unfamiliar rural road somewhere north of Appleton (about 2 hours north of my home in Milwaukee), there were drainage ditches between the edge of the road and where the telephone poles were. I feared my car would never make it over the ditch.
Finally the road led through a small country town consisting of not much more than a bar and grocery store. But it was lit up with a few light poles on the gravel shoulder of the main highway. This was it. I backed the car up several hundred yards, and then floored it, racing towards one of the light poles. A glance at the speedometer read 85 mph just before impact. And then total darkness…… for maybe 10-15 seconds.
The sound of my car horn blaring woke me up…. again. Again I had failed. With nothing better to do, I decided to try and crawl out of the wreckage. The car was now upside down, but my driver-side window was missing, so I began to climb out. The people who were in the bar across the street rushed over and helped me the rest of the way out. One guy exclaimed to his buddies, "Wow! Check it out! He knocked down the light pole!" It was probably the most excitement that little town had seen in years. They called an ambulance and took me to a nearby hospital.
At the hospital they did some routine checks on me, but other than a few bruises, I had driven my car into a light pole 85 mph and walked away from it. The police were able to contact my father through my licenses plates. I was kept in the hospital overnight for observations, mostly out of concern for the drugs I had taken.
So I laid there in the hospital bed staring at the ceiling and wondering why I was alive. The thought had never occurred to me that I would not succeed in ending my life. Then it hit me. I did not have control over my own life. God did. It was not mine to take. This was not some tremendous revelation or anything like that, it was just something I had learned that day through practical experience. And it gave me comfort. I felt as if God was saying to me: "I have a purpose for your life, just wait." From that night on I never again had the desire to take my own life.
The next day confirmed my suspicions that God had been in control the whole time. First the sheriff's report from the "accident" came in. I learned that my car had gone right through the light pole shearing it out of the ground, and then continued up the road, veered off into a drainage ditch, hit a culvert that went underneath a driveway which upended the car and flipped it over three times finally coming to rest upside down. Wow! And I walked away from that! But wait, it gets better….
My dad says to me, "Let's go to the crash site on the way home." Ok I thought, why not? As we drive down the rural highway heading north out of Appleton, we come to the small town where I crashed the car. The name of the town: Freedom. We drive over to the place where the car finally came to rest: right in front of a big country church. As I look at that church and reflect on God's control over my life, my Dad says to me: "Hey, look at the name of that bar across the street." I turn around and look at it: The Crash Inn. My Dad chuckles, and I feel like I'm in the twilight zone or something.
It's time to drive back to Milwaukee, but we decide to stop at the junk yard where they hauled my car. We ask the guy where the Torino is that they brought in this morning. The guy takes us to the car. He looks at the car, looks at me, and then asks, "Were you driving that car??" I nod in affirmant. The guy shakes his head in disbelief. "You see that car over there?" he says, pointing to a large wrecked car, "It's not half as smashed up as yours, but the guy driving that car didn't make it."
We walk over to what used to be my car. Totally demolished. The engine was pushed off its block, and half of it was in the passenger side front seat. The car basically crumpled when it took out the light pole. The guy said he couldn't even tow it, because the wheels and axles were bent. He had to use a flat-bed truck and lift it up there with a crane. After hauling it to the junk yard, he had to return a second time to pick up all the pieces. But the driver seat was still in tact. It was almost as if a protective bubble had been placed around it. I left there feeling like my life was worth something to God, and that he had me on this earth for some reason.
Going back to school, my whole outlook on life changed. I now had hope, believing that God had some purpose for my life. I had been brought up in church, and had been taught the Bible and the creeds of my Protestant denomination, but my faith was very "creedal" also: it didn't have much of an impact on my day to day life. So I went back to my old friends and my partying way of life.
But my attitude in school changed. I was enrolled in a specialty program in my senior year of high school majoring in business and marketing. With my new found self confidence, I excelled in the program, especially in demonstrating sales abilities. I won some awards in some city and state wide competitions, and purposed to graduate from high school and make a lot of money in sales. After graduating from high school, I quickly got certified and began to sell accident and health insurance door-to-door. I was doing great, and even sold a policy my first day on the field. But there was something missing, and I often felt guilty having "conned" someone to buy a policy that they probably didn't need and wasn't quite what they expected it to be.
So I got a job in a factory working a graveyard shift from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. three days on and three days off. It was a good hourly rate, and a lot of my buddies from high school were working there. It was boring work, and we all "got high" to help us make it through the long shifts. But I always saw it as temporary work, until I found a good sales job that I really liked. It allowed me some financial freedom, and I was able to rent a condominium with another friend. I was also able to buy a nice sports car. Life was great in many ways, I could now party as much as I wanted. But I was still empty and unsatisfied with my life. I knew there had to be more, and I just thought that if I could get a good job with the potential to advance in a career, that I would be happy.
After about a year out of high school and having worked at the factory for several months, I decided to get back into sales. This time I got a job selling educational books. It seemed like a more "worthy" product to be selling. But something inside of me said that I would not be happy doing this either if I didn't have God's blessing. So facing discouragement again, and having no where to go but forward, because I had already tried running away from my problems, and I had already tried exiting life and God wouldn't let me, I decided to try not getting high for a few days and just read the Bible, to try and understand what God's will was for my life.
This was July of 1979, and at that point I had been getting high on drugs every day for almost 4 years straight. As I read the Bible, and I don't even remember what exactly I was reading, I became acutely aware of my sins. I had always considered myself a Christian, and a good person. Even though I got high on drugs, I was no junkie. I rationalized my behavior as being no different than the casual social drinker of alcohol. It was just that one was legal and the other wasn't. But I thought the laws were wrong, not me.
But now two major sins in my life were staring me right in the face: one was my drug usage, and the other one was planning my life without considering what God wanted me to do with my life. Without even really understanding what the word "repentance" means, I saw myself in a different light, and knew that my sins were keeping me from knowing God's will. I immediately confessed my sins to God, and told him that I was not going to make any more decisions about my life until He told me what He wanted me to do.
What happened next is truly the miracle in my life, and words cannot come close to describing the inner transformation that occurred in me that summer day in 1979. First of all, a joy and peace flooded my being, such that I had never known could even exist in this life. It was the ultimate high, and it was from the Holy Spirit. It was so wonderful, that I took all my paraphernalia that I used to smoke pot and threw it into the dumpster outside our building. What I had found was so much better than drugs, that I never had a desire to get high on drugs again.
Secondly, the words in the Bible now came alive. It was as if God was speaking directly to me through them, and indeed He was. The facts I had studied for years as a kid growing up in church now became part of a vibrant relationship with the living God, and with the Savior of the world Jesus Christ. Having never doubted the facts of Jesus life, death, and resurrection, they now came alive with fresh meaning. I read the entire New Testament in about two weeks: I just couldn't get enough of it. When I read verses like Romans 5:7-8 "Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us," I would just fall down and weep over the incredible love God was showing me through Christ.
I now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God had saved me, not just from a suicide attempt, but He had truly saved me from my sins, and that I was now going to be with Him in eternity: "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." Hebrews 13:5
Since I had dedicated my life to God, I decided to go back to school and study the Bible. I studied the Bible for a number of years, and then served in full-time ministries in various parts of the world. But I have also learned that one does not have to be professional Christian minister to be serving God. You can serve God as a minister wherever you are in many different ways. Today my business is providing healthy food, and I seek to serve God in that task to the best of my ability. The Bible says, and science now confirms, that a "joyful heart is good medicine." The Bible has much to say about good health, and not all of it is physical. Our spiritual and emotional state has more to do with our health than our modern rationalistic society and medical system would care to admit. So if you are seeking better health, don't just look at your physical symptoms.
Look to the Great Physician, and healer of your soul, and give your heart to Christ for true peace with God. Then you will discover true health and life! Everything else on this website, and any product I have to offer you, is worthless if you don't know God and His incredible love for you, and understand His will for your life. The best part is that His offer of eternal life is free for you, because he already paid the price of your sins through the blood of his Son. I have nothing here to offer you that can beat that!
Peace!
Brian Shilhavy
Founder, Tropical Traditions, Inc.
Until next time…Take care of yourself!
P. S. I saw this the other day…can’t remember where:
Repentance is a change of mind and will arising from sorrow for sin and leading to transformation of life.
