Living With Intention | August 16th, 2006 
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A Note from Deanna  

Hello, subscribers…happy August!   

As a tribute to my analyst sister Kristie, who has inspired me toward “introduction-brevity” this month, I’m just going to share one quick but exciting announcement.   

September 12^th marks the launch of my pride and joy, a new workshop and tele-series (which will also become my new book!) called Infinite Abundance: How the Law of Attraction can transform your life.  For information and to register, see the resources section today.  Join me for a life-changing and joyous experience either in-person or via phone.   

Here’s to joy and abundance!

Deanna Davis, PhD

Deanna Davis, PhD deanna@appliedinsight.net www.AppliedInsight.net www.DeannaDavis.net

In this week's issue:

• Ideas for a Wildly Fulfilling Life: Straddling the Snare
• Ideas for a Remarkably Successful Life: Vivid Works
• Resources That Will Change Your Life: New Infinite Abundance Workshop
• Feedback and Free Stuff: Win a free workshop registration!
• Women Making a Difference: More Opportunities for Intentional Living
• Contact Info

Ideas for a Wildly Fulfilling Life…
Straddling the Snare  

For wildly elusive reasons, I have this rather obsessive but gratifying desire to learn to play the drums.  Perhaps I honed in on this goal because drums are the single least likely instrument I would ever be drawn to.  I mean, I am not musical in the least, and certainly not rhythmic in any way except to perform classical ballets such as Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.  Somehow, the notion of a ballerina playing a sweaty, rambunctious drum solo doesn’t fit my mental image of what drummers look like, although it packs a cool imagination punch to envision a straight-laced dancer, all tutus and toe shoes, rocking out with Def Leppard or Van Halen.  

Furthermore, I am not in any way musically inclined, a point proven by my piano teacher when I was about 9 years old, who dryly suggested that I might be better off to pursue other passions because piano didn’t appear to be my calling.  This gentle suggestion hid her raging internal dialogue that seethed, “why do you torment me with your apathy and utter disregard for musical scales???”  Even given these strikingly obvious hints that I would not be inclined toward a life of percussion, the drums still beckon to this day.  

So, as I started writing my new book, Infinite Abundance (which focuses on how the Law of Attraction can transform your life), I began deepening my practice of the underlying principles related to the Law of Attraction (such as gratitude, meditation, and visualizing).  One step in that direction was to refine my “dream boards,” which consist of pictures and phrases of the key experiences and things I want to have in my life.  They cover everything from how I want to be as a mom, wife, and friend, to where I want to travel, to the professional successes I want to achieve and the type of home I want to create (hint: it’s an oasis of order and harmony, a rather bold leap from the charming but cluttered reality I live in today).   

My dream boards include pictures of everything from the whole-grain Mediterranean diet that will support my healthy body (coupled with appropriate chocolate indulgences that will support my healthy quest for pleasure), to the IPOD I want to own, to the yoga poses and tropical islands I want to frequent.  There are scads of photos of books I want to read, massages I yearn for, charitable ventures I want to spearhead, and bestseller lists I want to top.  Everything important to me is represented somehow on my boards.  

In any case, the key to this dream/vision board process is to include vivid images of how you want your life to be so that your mind begins working on your behalf—both consciously and subconsciously—to help manifest those desires.  It basically helps anchor your mind to a visual image and to the “feeling” of having what you desire, which increases the likelihood you will achieve it.  As I’ve talked about before in Living With Intention, visualizing “magnetizes” you to attract what you want by activating a part of your brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS).  The RAS opens your eyes and your mind to opportunities, resources, and ideas that help you realize your goals more easily and quickly than you could ever imagine.   

One thing that dawned on me, though, is that I was missing a picture of this long-held dream—to play the drums.  Right around the time I realized this, I attended the wedding of my wonderful friends Alison and Tom.  The band had some technical difficulties, so while everyone else was lending a helping hand to get the music up and running, I jumped at the chance to sit down at the vacated drums and have my picture taken for my dream board.  Rest assured, it wasn’t just a matter of self-interest winning out over the opportunity to help—these people wouldn’t have wanted my technologically-challenged mojo anywhere near the electronics.  So, in essence, I was really doing them a favor by focusing on the drums and not the power issue.  

I sauntered up to the drummer, whom I’m sure was poised to hear some suggestion about the electrical problems or a compliment about her playing.  Instead, what she faced was something akin to a kindergartner sauntering up to a Disney character for a photo op when I said, “can I have my picture taken with your drums because I want to learn to play someday and I want a picture to put on my dream board?”  She raised an eyebrow as if to say “ok, someone’s had one too many champagne toasts tonight,” but instead enthusiastically offered, “of course, but be sure you straddle the snare so you really look like you know what you’re doing.”  

Hmmmm.  I didn’t really know what a snare was and I certainly had never been invited to straddle one.  It felt a bit risqué’, a bit sassy, perhaps illicit in some way.  I wasn’t altogether certain that good Lutheran girls (or even moderately not-too-terribly-bad Lutheran girls like myself) straddled things like snares.  In fact, I questioned whether it was legal in my Eastern Washington county to straddle snares.  She saw my trepidation and led me over to the drum set, where I learned that a snare was a drum.  I felt simultaneously relieved and disappointed and limbered myself up for a memorable straddle.  She showed me how to sit, positioned my hands with the sticks, and told me to mug for the camera.  And, voila, thanks to my friend Lynn, the picture you see here of me straddling the snare is the result.  DANG, if I don’t look like I was born to play the drums!   

After viewing the picture, I simply knew that it would lead to me learning to drum sooner than later.  And, I knew that “Straddling the Snare” was destined to be a chapter heading in my book.  So, on a recent writer’s retreat, while enjoying one of my long walks along the river, I began pondering writing about straddling the snare.  As I walked along, I started to imagine what it would be like to catalog the journey from hatching this goal to its realization.  I traced back to when my interest first started—my first year in college, when my favorite radio station—KZZU FM—would blast the song “I don’t want to work, I just want to bang on these drums all day” every Friday morning and I would bounce around my mom’s townhouse primping and prepping.   

Now, the fact of the matter is that I really did want to work—I loved my job.  And, I didn’t at the time really want to bang on drums all day—I preferred step aerobics and occasional club dancing.  And, finally, the song wasn’t really my style—I was more of a (gulp) Mili Vanilli and Wilson Phillips type person (please stop laughing, catch your breath, and read on).  But something about the song made me want to perform appalling but heartfelt air-band renditions of the drumming.   

I traced that fledgling interest forward in my mind to the long-standing bantering between my husband and I about the possibilities of learning to play the drums so that I could accompany him as an accordion player.  We had always joked that by doing so, we would be the life of the party wherever we went, the center stage for family events, and (no doubt) the bane of our children’s existence.  We reasoned that the psychological torment of our children would be a worthy price to pay to share joy and good will everywhere we went.  I mean, who can resist grinning and toe-tapping in the presence of a really good polka?  

Now, for those of you who haven’t seen my husband, the likelihood of him playing the accordion is even more of a stretch for the imagination than me playing the drums.  As I’ve mentioned before, my most common manner of describing Michael is, “now, he’s a big dude.”  And, he has substantially rotund fingers, which he refers to as effective only for “smashing bugs as a kid.”  (We’ll let him deal with the Karma implications of that on his own).  I simply refer to them as “mammoth nubs.”  In fact, I’m convinced that, aside from the entertainment value of inciting giggles when he got up to play, his real accordion-playing motive is to be a perennial invitee to everyone’s Oktoberfest celebrations due to his propensity for enjoying a good German brewski on occasion.  Yet, the mere thought of Michael sporting lederhosen is enough to send uncontrollable waves of laughter through my being.  But back to the story at hand.  

The fact of the matter is that Michael is the most unlikely of accordion players and I am the most unlikely of drummers, which makes it even more blissfully entertaining to imagine our little polka band in the future.  It’s really the antithesis of anything our friends and family would ever fathom we would do.  Yet, we’re fully committed to our future signature “and a one-uh and a two-uh” introduction to our Oktoberfest gigs.  

As I continued to envision becoming a drummer, I knew I was doing it both for my own  private amusement and in enthusiastic support of our future polka hit parade.  As I visualized, rather than asking “how will I make this happen?” or focusing on things like time constraints, the fact that I have no detectable musical ability whatsoever, or questions about the market for unlikely polka bands, I just pictured the image of me straddling the snare and kept walking.  My mind moved from famous drum solo to famous drum solo until I settled in on the song “Wipeout,” which boasts one of the most easily recognized drum solos in music.   

All of a sudden, I felt this rush of excitement when I realized that, at a conference earlier in the year, I had actually met Rick, a drummer who played with The Surfaris, the band best known for their song “Wipeout.”  I remembered what a kind, upbeat person he was (I didn’t realize that pun was here until the editing phase…I just had to keep it in).  I reflected on how I felt a really positive connection with him and admired his spirit.  I started imagining what it might be like to learn how to play a drum solo—ok, I’m not necessarily ambitious enough to try Wipeout at the offset—but any drum solo from a drummer of that renown.  

So, I booked it back to my hotel room and fired off a quick email to him, telling him about my goal and asking if he might be willing to teach me a drum solo.  Much to my delight, he responded with a gracious “yes” to my request and told me how to get started so I’d be familiar with the drums before we met.  Then, it would just be a matter of the logistics of meeting up in the same city to make it happen (he lives beachside in California —go figure).  It just so happens that my book publicity campaign for Living With Intention was launching and I would likely have the opportunity to meet up with him in coming months during my travel.   

I was giddy and filled with awe.  I mean, I had been casually talking about playing the drums for years, but it wasn’t until I attached a specific image of what it would look like and a sensation of what it would feel like, that opportunities beyond my wildest imagination presented themselves with no real effort on my part.  Who knew that, simply by straddling the snare, I’d be well on my way to knowing how to use it?  Techniques like visualization, creating dream boards, and using other tools for engaging your mind in achieving your dreams are more powerful than you might guess.  Read on, because article #2 gives you a few great strategies for designing your unique way of straddling the snare.

Ideas for A Remarkably Successful Life…  
Vivid Works

So, you’re ready to start dabbling in visualization to help your mind do more of the work to pull you toward your dreams.  Great first step.  Your second step will be to truly grasp the fact that visualization works best when it’s both vivid and emotion-based.  When you experience your dreams and desires in this way, it means that you rely on every sense to truly experience the idea of having what you want, and to actually feel what it would feel like to have it.   

Bathe yourself in detail—what do you see, hear, smell, taste, feel when you think of this thing you want?  What emotions well up inside of you when you create this vibrant picture in your mind or on paper? Your goal is to fully immerse yourself in every aspect of the experience—acting “as if” you already have this thing you want in your life.  Bask in the bliss and celebrate the certainty that this thing is in the process of making its way toward you.  It is this deep level of detail and emotion that fully magnetizes you to attract what you want.  

The final step will be for you to decide which method(s) of visualization will be the best fit for you.  To help you do that, here are a few ways to integrate visualization into your process of attracting what you want in your life.  Read through them and try one or two on for size to see how they feel.  

1)    Dream/vision boards.  This is the process of collecting pictures, images, and phrases illustrating the things that you would like to manifest in your life.  They could be taken from magazine clippings, actual photos, items pulled from the web, artistic renderings, or any number of other sources.  Simply make them clear and vivid.  Then, attach them to poster board or notebook paper, scrapbook pages or bulletin boards—it doesn’t matter the method you use to display them, so long as you can easily access and view them on a regular basis.  As you look at the images, focus on how they make you feel—that will help them have more of an impact on attracting what you want.  

2)    Desire box/file.  You may prefer to simply take images of what you want to attract into your life and place them in a box or file of some kind.  Some people refer to this as the “universal requisitions” box, or “God’s in-box,” or their “dream file.”  Whatever strikes your fancy, simply set up a receptacle of some kind, and when your run across something that you want to be, do, have, experience, or give, meditate on that image or phrase for a few moments, and then place it in the box or file.  Review the contents on a regular basis to further ingrain the detail and emotion into your mind.  

3)    Want/wish list.  While I am a strong proponent of having both a want/wish list and a visual representation of that list (since the mind thinks in pictures), there is great benefit to simply sitting down to write out a detailed list of the things you want to have in your life.  This can be done through a solo journaling process or with a partner, where each of you can repeatedly ask the other person “what do you want?”  The person who asks the question will be the one who records the respondent’s answers.  It’s a great way of building momentum and creativity for your desire list and an outstanding way to keep you from editing or over-analyzing your list as you go.  Remember, if it pops into your mind as something you desire, whether it’s a mocha, a new car, or a soul mate, it goes on the list.  Review and add to your list of desires frequently, and remember to center yourself in the feeling of having that thing in your life—it will help speed up the process of bringing it to you.  

Choose one of these methods and just watch how it helps you stay focused, energized, and eager to receive all of those wonderful things that are on their way to you.