Yesterday, I told the Universe to send me a coat. I didn’t include a long wordy spec with my request. I just sent out a picture of it. As they say, a picture speaks a thousand words and that might be why I find, in all these types of shamanic communications, that metaphors in the land of the imagination pack much more of a punch.
The coat I visualised was a simple classic style, straight down to the mid-calf, in dark blue wool and single-breasted.
Then I went out. It wasn’t in the first charity shop I visited – Cancer Research. It wasn’t in the Shaw Trust one either. But when I walked through the door of St. Margaret’s Hospice, there it was hanging on the rail for £12.99. When I got it home, and inspected the inside label, it turned out to be a mix of wool and cashmere. I looked online at similar coats; they start at around £100 and end up at more than a thousand pounds. So as you can imagine, I am utterly over the moon with it!
But it also caused me to reflect and realise that I’ve been practising the Law of Attraction of The Secret for some time now without calling it that, and so not giving its author Rhonda Byrne her dues.
When The Secret first came out in 2006, I watched it and was intrigued along with everyone else. But it didn’t grab me enough for me to practise it and that was for three reasons.
It was too slick and commercial, it was too concentrated on material wealth but more importantly – and this is an annoying part of my personality – I can never adopt a practice, any kind of practice, without being able to see its moving parts so that I can understand how it works. (Of course, this doesn’t include me switching on electric lights – I mean, no-one on Earth know how electricity works. It just does.)
Anyway, Rhonda Byrne – quite rightly, I now understand – did not want to include the explanation because that would have seriously limited her audience to the sort of boffin-types who like to poke around old dusty bookshops looking for undiscovered blueprints to immortality. Most people in the mainstream don’t want to know how stuff works – they just want to know what it will do for them and where they can get it. So in sticking to those marketing principles, Byrne managed to sell 30 million copies worldwide.
In 2006, I was just setting out in my shamanic practices and so still had big L plates on. I didn’t know anything much at all. I still don’t, really … but I have realised in recent years, through shamanism and studying the Mystery Teachings, that I am the author of the storybook of my life and that whatever I concentrate on – good or bad – will manifest on to the pages of that book.
I also understand much more now about the immense magnetic power of gratitude. I can feel it buzzing around me, like bees around a honeypot, with a potency that builds and builds when I give heartfelt thanks for all that the Universe has given me. I find it is an especially powerful practice just as I’m falling asleep and floating in the netherworlds of betwixt and between – and I suppose that’s why children used to be encouraged to say their prayers before bedtime.
However, prayers are sorts of petitions. For me, it is much more potent not to say ‘please’, but to say ‘thank you’ for all that I have and all that I am about to receive.
I am now waiting impatiently for the colder weather to hurry up and come, so I can wear my lovely new coat. I’m not going to bring it about by the Law of Attraction, though, because then I wouldn’t be very popular with those who hate winter!
Annie Dieu-Le-Veut 