The Viable Alternative

2013 was truly a crappy, difficult year that I was truly happy about when it ended.

First off, a woman who was a close family friend (she was friends with my parents and I was friends with her kids) and gave me my first summer job after my Freshman year in college was killed in a gruesome accident.

Three months later, I lost a childhood friend and then 6 weeks later, his father died, and then three weeks after that, another childhood friend of mine within the same crew got diagnosed with testicular cancer, which he thankfully beat.

Fun times.

While these instances certainly sucked, the persistent pain the entire year was the frustration I dealt with regarding my finances. I had decided to go back into real estate as an agent and from the beginning of the year, I couldn’t close a deal to save my life. It took me 6 months to close my first deal and I think I only did two or three after that.

Day in and day out, I would come early to my office, grind it out by viewing apartments, posting ads, responding to inquiries from clients and taking them out only to leave the office late in the evening with no results. As a job that was full commission, no results meant no money.

In the meantime, it seemed that everybody was closing deals around me and receiving these nice commission checks.

“If only I could close a deal,” I thought to myself, “I could make some money and not feel like I was merely taking up space in the office.”

This sense of embarrassment and feeling like a failure made me more attached to the outcome of closing a deal which made me push harder which gave me an air of desperation which, in turn, if you know anything about being too desperate for something, guarantees that you push that thing further away from you.

There were so many things that I planned to do with the money I earned to live the life I had envisioned for myself but with me not being able to have the success I wanted at this gig, I had to put my plans on hold which gave me this feeling that my life was on hold.

I felt trapped, like a caged animal, because there was a world out there that I wanted to live and a type of person I wanted to be, but circumstances were blocking me from living them and I being that type of person.

I wanted my circumstances to change so badly so I can be free but nothing was moving.

There are few things more emasculating than feeling imprisoned by the circumstances around you that refuse to budge no matter how much of a concerted effort you put into changing them.

You want to either lash out at the world, beat yourself up for being an inept fool, or, ahem…jump out of a window.

The thing is that even though things sucked and it would’ve been nice if things were “better,” the issue wasn’t the circumstances, the issue was ME. I felt trapped but it didn’t have to be that way.

If you’ve been feeling trapped due to some situation going on in your life – relationship, finances, career, health, living situation, etc. – because you’ve thrown everything and the kitchen sink at it and things stubbornly won’t budge, and now you’re left waiting for things to change in order for you to feel better, that’s the issue right there: you’re waiting for things to change in order for you to feel better.

Why not just feel better now?

Why do these undesirable circumstances have to be an excuse for you to not embody the feelings associated with the circumstances that you do want to see?

The only reason that you don’t do this is because you’ve been conditioned to behave a certain way by parents, peers, friends, family, adults when growing up, the media and society as a whole that involves you looking for permission from the outer world to allow you to feel a certain way and allowing circumstances to dictate how you think and feel.

It seems so normal because you’ve been doing it your entire damn life. This is The Illusion that we’ve all been programmed into where we’re taught to give our power away to our circumstances and the environment around us.

Now if you’re cursing me out as you read this and saying all sorts of unkind things about my mother because I couldn’t possibly know how hard you’ve had it, let me ask you this: can you imagine a the sight of a green pig flying through the air and you being amused by it? Can you imagine a very sad moment in your life? Can you imagine someone that you’re very attracted to?

If the answer is “yes,” (which I hope it is), then you can certainly escape the prison you’ve been living in by creating an intention for the circumstances you desire for yourself and combining it with the feelings associated with it, and then consistently live in that feeling in the midst of your sucky circumstances.

When you do this, you will lower the stress levels in your body which will put you in a more resourceful state which will enable you to start seeing opportunities that you previously couldn’t see that will enable you to change your situation.

You will also vibrate at a higher energy, which will cause you to attract ideas, circumstances and people that will help create a new reality for you.

Yes, I said it. You attract what you vibrate. If there is any question about that, I invite you to walk around with a heavy scowl on your face for the next few days and see the “goodies” that come to you.

When you experience a strong feeling in your body, it doesn’t know the difference of whether it’s an actual event or an imagined event, so you can “trick” you body into believing that you’re living different circumstances, and it’ll respond accordingly.

We’re made up of atoms, and atoms are 99.9% energy, so we’re made up of energy. Emotions are energy. An emotion is also a vibration. The frequency at which we vibrate determines what we attract in our lives, so if we want to change our situation, we have to change our frequency.

Now, one of my gripes among many about the self help industry and Churches is that they have all these nice platitudes regarding this subject such as “Your attitude determines your altitude,” or “Walk by Faith not by sight” but at the end of the day, we have little to NO idea of how to implement these fluffy, sometimes annoying platitudes in our lives.

The truth of the matter is, learning to think and feel above your circumstances involves the breaking of an old habit and adopting a new habit, so I promise you, IT WILL TAKE SOME CONCERTED EFFORT BEFORE THE NEW HABIT TAKES HOLD.

It will involve you first figuring out the emotions associated with the circumstances you want to feel in your life and then setting some time aside to feel these feelings with your heart on a regular basis so you become familiar with them. Then, you have to become conscious of ALL the times when you slip into your old programming of thinking and feeling in accordance to your undesirable circumstances and when that happens, interrupt this pattern and replace it with choosing to feel the emotion(s) that you’ve been practicing.

Note that this doesn’t mean suppressing your emotions (I will explain about that in part 2 of this post).

As with the breaking of any habit, I promise you it’s not going to be easy, but what’s the alternative? Feeling trapped by your circumstances where you’re just a passive spectator in your life?

By engaging in this process, you will feel more powerful in your life because you will be giving your own self the permission to be, do and have what you want in your life rather than your circumstances. Your relationship with your circumstances will become more empowering because rather than being seen as something that traps you, you will see it as an opportunity to help you shed your own skin and grow into someone stronger and wiser.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps.

Ike Love