Q&A: The Secret to Making Dreams Come True

Q: I've read the book "The Secret". I have a clear vision of the career I want, and how well it will turn out. I can see myself as an officer in the military, wearing the uniform, and having a good career. How can these visions help? How does this means of making your dreams come true actually work?

A. Good question!  The answer is a little complicated - a little yes and a little no.  In my opinion, you can create your own future...but it doesn't work quite the way it they make it seem. You DO create your own future, BUT you create it through your choices, what you do, what you say...or what you choose not to do or not to say...not by sitting around thinking about it. Magnetizing, drawing things to you has its place, but it is not everything. You know that yin-yang symbol in marital arts? It's true...you can't have yin without yang and vice versa. Just effort won't get you where you want to go, you have to use your head and your heart too. By the same token, mind without action and effort won't get you there either. 

I believe visualizations are important and useful. But they are to guide, decide and motivate NOT to do the creating all by themselves. 

You mentioned visualizing yourself as a successful military officer.  That vision, and your intuitive response to it, can help you decide if this really is the right career path for you. It can guide your choices in working toward that goal. You might want to choose to do ROTC instead of football for example, or choose not to throw the punch that keeps you out of trouble and gets you into officer training. Those are just examples...nothing literal...but you get the idea.

If your goal requires a lot of sustained work, effort, difficult choices, or sacrifices, it's easy to get down and discouraged sometimes. Visualizations can help you stay motivated. If you are in the middle of some really suck-ish basic training, visualize the end result that you've seen before to help you hang in there. 

The law of attraction and similars is a real thing...like attracts like. It doesn't magically deliver a particular future, and visualizations won't give you the exact details of what the future holds, BUT your heart and mind-set will attract like minded people into your life and will make your journey easier and more fulfilling. As you learn, grow, work, visualize, love and live your dream - you might find old friends fall away and new like-minded people start to come into your life. This takes away the drag of some negative energy people and adds positive energy people to your life. So focusing on light, compassion, your goals does help bring those things into your life, but in this supportive way, not a direct POOF magic way.

That's how I think you can make your dreams into reality. Focus, meditation, visualization can help guide you to good choices, and help keep you motivated to do the things you need to do in order to make your dream a reality. Aligning your thoughts and energies with positive thinking, love, compassion, optimism - that will help clear the way, and draw supportive people into your life...but you still need to act. Visualizations show you the right path, and motivate you to keep going, but you still have to do the walking. 

Does that make sense?

Best Wishes to you!

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Today's Tarot - 7 of Coins

Sometimes success can be found where knowledge, observation and action meet.

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Today's Tarot - The World

Since when is money and success the same thing? Define success in your own terms, not other people's, and chances are you'll discover how successful you ARE right now.


Just because someone is wealthy does not automatically mean they are moral, wise, enlightened, compassionate, has common sense or is a good leader.


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Today's Tarot - Ace of Swords

The ace of swords is associated with "awakening". Ted Andrews -his books have inspired, instructed, and defacto mentored me for ages...buy and read them please!! www.dragonhawkpublishing.com - but like I was saying, Ted Andrews reads the ace of swords as "new rhythms of success" (Animal Wise Tarot).

The idea of material success connected to spiritual awakening isn't as uncommon as one might think, and not necessarily for the better, but it isn't entirely evil either. Like everything, the place where spirituality and material wealth meet has both good and bad aspects to it.

Growing up in the south, I always had a very negative impression of the idea. I grew up in the most right-wing, social conservative, republican, evangelical, fundamentalist, deep-dark-ruby-red counties you'll find on the map. In the 70s (and maybe since, I don't know) there was an undercurrent of thinking that if you were "right with god" and "living right", that material needs would somehow be magically met - a sort of get rich quick by being religious scheme. No surprise, it doesn't work that way, and the only people getting money were the overly-dramatic evangelists. Even as a kid, I could see that connection between the "spiritual" and "material" spawning a toxic whirlpool of judgementalism and lack of good judgement managing money. My reflex is to steer toward logic and work when it comes to earning a living and connect wealth-meets-spirituality with ideas like contentment, releasing unrealistic desires.

But over the years I've also learned that there IS another connection between personal and spiritual growth and material needs, other than the obvious learning to be content with the way things are.

Here again we see that acceptance is not acquiescence. Just because we accept the reality of what IS doesn't mean we can't act to try and change it. As it turns out, change is the cornerstone of that place where material success and spirituality meet.

Like Master Gracenin (www.dctaichi.com) always told us...'keep doing what you've been doing and you'll keep getting what you've been getting'. If things are going well, keep up the good work. If things aren't so good, they won't get any better until something changes.

Even if that something is us. Change is big, bad, scary thing for a lot of people, which makes BOTH spiritual growth and movement toward success (however you define it) an intimidating process.

Success, both materially and spiritually, often requires change...sometimes permanent change. Never mind bank accounts...think of weight loss. To have lasting success at that, you have to change your habits - permanently.

So Mr. Andrews interpretation of the ace of swords as changing rhythms of success is spot-on once again.

Daily Meditation Tarot Reading - The World

What good does it serve to put the brakes on your own success? Why not allow yourself to work, to learn, to achieve?


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Today's Tarot - The World

Neither worldly success nor spiritual growth is a spectator sport. To learn a Way of living, just live that way. Then you can make adjustments as you learn and go along.

"BE the change you wish to see in the world" ~ Mahatma Gandhi

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Today's Tarot -

The World card is a hopeful, encouraging end to the major arcana. It speaks of career success, happiness, love, abundance. It hints at an ability to touch infinity, and draw what we need into our lives in an insightful, productive way.


This card is part of the major arcana because it also carries some potent reminders about success. Sometimes there are costs, balances that must be struck. Sometimes that balance is carried on the back of perception. Success comes and goes in an eyeblink when we shift our perception of our life and of the world around us.


The World card can remind us that success doesn't have to be huge or immediate in order to be valid, valuable, and enduring.


May you touch infinity and abundance.








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Today's Tarot - Ace of Coins

Finding contentment is success. Meeting your own expectations is success, even if that is a very different measure from what others expect of you. Allow yourself, and you succeed.








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www.RondaSnow.com

9 of coins

Want something? Work for it.

Not all work is physical, personal growth, insight, wisdom, gaining emotional maturity...sometime this is the hardest work of all.

Baihu
www.modern-oracle-tarot.com

10 of SWORDS

This time of year has always been associated with dark, even frightening scary things...Halloween, longer, colder nights, the shortages and disease associated with winters past.

They say the veil is thin between this world and the next this time of year... maybe that is why some of the most challenging and even frightening cards the Tarot deck has to offer.

There is nothing to be gained by avoiding or sugar-coating the cards, so lets roll up our metaphysical sleeves and take a look at the 10 of swords.

Even the artwork on this card, in the Raider-White deck anyway, is a little intimidating. It can't be fun for that guy to be face down in the dirt with a bunch of swords sticking out of his back. Yikes!

Traditional meanings for the card include treachery, defeat, ending, ruin...not fun stuff.

The 10 of Swords is a little less drastic than the Death card. It can mean ultimate, final end...but the connotation is more compartmentalized. Rather than a global, irreversable life-altering change, this is more like a project that fails. A romance ending, an invention that doesn't sell, the hand-made sweater 5 sizes too big...that sort of thing. Like the Death card, though, the 10 of swords also has the promise of new beginnings. Only an empty cup can be filled...even if the emptying process isn't a lot of fun. "As one door closes, another opens."

The little I've read about numerology tends to associate the number 10 in general to extreme ending and finality...we leave single digits and enter the next level.

From the yin-yang perspective of eastern philosophy we again see the idea of any extreme becoming its opposite...ending becomes beginning, one more than nine is demonstrated with a zero and a one...

The same is true of the of failure seen in this card. In the extreme of failure lies the seeds of success. I think of it like those Dyson commercials, where they talk of all the prototypes it took to develop their product. Another favorite example is Pixar's "Meet the Robinsons" one of our family's favorite movies..."yeah! you failed!"...you can learn from failure, but from success "not so much".

I believe this is the lesson of the 10 of swords, too.

This tarot card asks us to think about why we fail in life...and who defines our successes and failures?

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"Failure is always an option" ~ Mythbusters

If we use failure to learn persistence, clarity of understanding, release of attachments...and all the other things that adversity can teach...then failure becomes something to be celebrated, not dreaded. Or at least taken in stride

"keep moving forward"!

Baihu

www.modern-oracle-tarot.com

The Hanged Man - psychic tarot daily meditation

The Hanged Man - All things unfold in their own time. Enjoy the journey, and don't worry about arbitrary measures of time and achievement. One man's stuck in mud is another man's day at the spa.

daily meditation 8 of swords

8 of Swords:

Numerology isn’t my strong suite. WAAAYYYYY too much like math and arithmatic…

But it comes up often enough in Tarot readings. The cards are numbered, and lots of one number or another can turn up and is usually a hint or message-carrier of some sort. Most of the time I just refer the sitter to the internet to learn about the numbers for themselves. That way they are more likely to find the true message for them, rather than have their perceptions of the number formed by my interpretations.

A friend of mine swears by Doreen Virtues’ Angel numbers. I found it a bit of snooze, and didn’t resonate with it at all…except for the number 8

She cites the number as being the symbol for infinity. This is also true in the Hindu / Buddhist tradition, and is part of the reason meditation beads from that tradition often have 108 beads.

She also associates it with abundance, and career luck. I’ll take that nowadays. Wouldn’t we all?

In most cases I associate swords with our relationship with society at large. The idea of “steadfastness” combined with the number 8’s abundance and career luck leads me to this simple bit of wisdom that we all know…but warrants a thought in today’s economy. 

It is sort of a cosmic ‘hang in there’

Steadfastness, and persistence is an essential element in success, in the mental, physical or spiritual realms, all three.

In our physical livelihood, we persist for material success. You can’t get a paycheck if you don’t show up for work every day. It takes persistence  to keep at our chosen career, improve it, succeed at it.

In the mental realm, it takes persistence to learn. Repetition is a key element in learning at any age.

Spiritually, growth, learning, experiencing, observing…all are continual aspects of our spiritual life. That never ceases. Plus if we move in the opposite direction here…our spiritual supports are steadfast, persistant and reliable. If we don’t feel that kind of persistent and utterly reliable guidance and support from our spiritual path, then we may be on the wrong path…but that is an idea for another day.

So Steadfastness and persistence are an element of success in mind, body, and spirit, to borrow a phrase from Holistic Health.

It also connotes an element of self-discipline. We have to be self-disciplined enough to do what we need to do to care for ourselves so we are physically able to work our jobs, find our jobs, and provide for ourselves and our families.

It takes self-dicipline to learn and practice something new, to keep mentally progressing and not stagnate. This will help keep the mind sharp and the emotions healthy.

It takes self-discipline to ask the hard questions, face the hard realities and choose the right spiritual path, and to persist on that path of spirituality once we find the right one.

All of these things have some thread of connection with our place in society and our personal responsibility. All topics that have become relevant in national politics and society at large today.

All of these things have connections with success and abundance on both the material and intangible plains.

Wishing you an infinity of success and the steadfastness to get you there.