What To Do When The Law Of Attraction Doesn’t Work

Before you can answer that you have to take a step back and ask yourself what you believe the Law Of Attraction actually is!

Either you believe that for some reason the Law Of Attraction isn’t working, or perhaps even doesn’t exist…

OR

You believe it is working, but you’re somehow not getting the technique quite right.

In other words, it’s either the “law’s” fault or it’s your fault.

Now I can’t tell you from a quantum physics point of view exactly what the Law Of Attraction is because I’m not a quantum physicist.

Besides, even quantum physicists don’t seem to completely agree on the subject!

What I can tell you comes from personal experience and deduction.

Let’s be Sherlock Holmes here.

The Law Of Attraction as we’ve come to understand it in our time seems to suggest that if I focus on an outcome with enough intensity, enough imagination, enough belief, enough emotional vibration that matches it … it will show up in my life. All my ducks will somehow obediently line up in a row.

And after 30 years, give or take, of experimenting with it I have found that that’s the case sometimes but more often than not it doesn’t work out.

Fact: The Law Of Attraction Doesn’t Work For ANYONE All The Time!

I’ve yet to meet anyone who can say that every time they practice the Law Of Attraction whatever they ask for shows up without fail.

And yet things are not random.

Now I can say that every time I tie my shoelaces, generally speaking they stay tied! I can rely on my lace-tying technique with about 99.9% certainty that my shoes will stay tied until I choose to untie them myself.

I want the law of attraction to be as reliable as that.

I’ve learned the skill of tying laces and know how to do it. It works every time.

I don’t put my shoes on and wonder if my shoes will fall off today!

I couldn’t live that way, could you?

For the longest time I thought it was my fault when things didn’t manifest. Somehow, I concluded, I must be doing the Law Of Attraction wrong because so many times my desires simply didn’t manifest.

So I’d study the technique more. Or I’d delve into myself more. Or both.

I’d think that my personal development needed a tweak, that there must be some subconscious beliefs that were getting in the way.

But then I hit another big big roadblock!

Fact: The Law Of Attraction Doesn’t Work On Everything. (That Would Be Impossible)

It appears that there are serious limits on what I can and can’t attract in any case.

For example, suppose I that I’m going to visit a friend on the other side of the world and the weather forecast says there’s a tornado going to hit that area on the day I’m due to land. Can I attract good
weather for the other side of the world?

I don’t think so!

If the weather forecasters have it right, nothing I do is likely to change it.

Now I know people have said that they’ve influenced the weather and maybe they have.

Who am I to say?

But I’m pretty certain that the weather is outside of my control.

Another example. I look at my personal circumstances. I’m getting older and there are visible signs of that. I don’t have anything to do with that!

How about my own birth?

I don’t remember having any say about that and there are things that happened to me in my childhood – such as my mother dying from cancer when I was still a child – that clearly I had no control over.

So, either I, or somehow the entire family, subconsciously attracted my mother’s terminal cancer, or nobody did.

Right, now let’s backtrack one more step and consider the underlying premise that we believe about the law of attraction.

You can check it out see if it’s the same for you.

It’s very simply states: “We create our reality with our thoughts and beliefs.”

That sounds simple enough, yet now we have a catalogue of errors because first of all we have the idea that our thoughts are something that we can control.

That seemed to be true to me for a long time.

Fact: You Can’t Control Your Thoughts. (D’oh!)

I thought that I could control my thinking. After all, I can decide to think about a sunny day. I can decide to think about fluffy kittens. So can you … but I can’t decide what I’m going to be thinking a minute from now or this time tomorrow or next week or next month or next year!

I have no idea what’s going to pop into my head in the future.

And sometimes negative thoughts and fearful thoughts and anxious thoughts will pop into my head just like they will pop into yours! It’s part of being human and there’s nothing we can do about that.

Retrospectively we can notice a thought and say to ourselves, “No I don’t want that thought. I’m going to think a positive thought instead.”

But in advance you can’t do that. So you have to be constantly vigilant – which is hugely stressful, to say the least.

And here’s where the next error creeps in: What is the “reality” that you think you’re creating?

I eventually realised it’s not the “big out there.” It’s not the stars and the moon and the trees and the cars and the cats and the dogs and the weather and all that stuff.

I’m not creating that, thank goodness! What a responsibility!

So if I’m not creating that then what am I creating?

The problem arises because we have mistakenly defined the term “reality.”

Clearly, there are things that happen in my life over which
I have no control – we’ve established that.

People leaving, changing location, dying or being born, to name but a few obvious examples.

I’m sure I have nothing to do with changes of government, yet I can name a time when new government policies massively altered the course of my career.

All such things are outside of anyone’s control.

Whilst it could be argued that you’re always “in the right place at the right time” and that “there’s no such thing as coincidence,” in the end, those arguments lead back to the same place: Most of what happens to us is not something we can do anything about.

Besides, you’d need a crystal ball to know they were coming your way at all!

So what is within my control?

What we are actually creating is not our reality in the sense of the 3-dimensional “knock on wood” kind of reality.

We are creating our experience!

Now, that feels real – and that’s the true definition of “reality.” You’re not creating things and whilst you certainly have an influence on circumstances, that’s not the same as creating them like some kind of demigod!

Your thoughts create your experience of reality. And in turn, those thoughts create the way you feel about life.

Thought + Feeling = Experience.

And experience FEELS REAL!

Simple example: two people can watch the same movie. One of them is bored by it, the other is moved to tears.

It’s the same movie!

The movie didn’t make you feel something. If it did that, everyone would feel the same way about it … indeed about everything.

Perhaps a clearer example is of a child’s teddy bear.

If a child is upset and is then given its teddy bear, the child may calm down or feel better very quickly. It appears as though the feelings of comfort are coming from the bear, but the bear is merely a stuffed toy with, (I hate to break it to you), no feelings of any kind!

Fact: All Experience Comes From Inside You

When you understand that your experience is coming from inside you, then you can choose whether to latch onto it – in which case it will feel like reality – or simply let it pass by, like a fluffy white cloud on a clear summer’s day. And in that case, it won’t touch your life at all.

I used to have a colleague when I worked in hospitals who’d drive me crazy because she’d find something to complain about no matter what was happening.

Yet another colleague – also a personal friend – found her amusing and easy to deal with and loved being on shift with her.

Was the person intrinsically irritating, or was I experiencing irritation which, like it or not, came from within me?

I’ve had friends who’ve fallen madly in love with people I thought were boring and dull.

Love, like beauty and every experience, is within the mind of the beholder – to misquote Keats.

We’ll talk more about letting go of fearful, anxious and generally negative thoughts in future posts, but for now, let simply knowing that it’s all coming from and through you be enough.

That puts you firmly in the driver’s seat of your life, because now you know that nothing out there can possibly affect you unless you allow it to!

And that’s freedom!