# 48 STRETCH YOUR THOUGHTS

     When you feel you have good command at quieting your thoughts, you are ready to progress to the first step in thought direction:  stretching your thoughts. 

     Remember the 60,000 thoughts a day you have?  Motivational coaches hired by professional athletes or CEO’s of fortune 500 companies instruct their protégé’s to take one thought and hold it for as long as they possibly can.  That is what I want you do.  Take only one constructive thought and practice holding it.  The only requirement is that it must be a neutral thought.  Do not think of anything that you feel overly emotional about.    Think of a shoelace, a leaf, or a fish. 

     Roll the thought over in your mind.  What does your thought look like?  Hold this picture for several minutes if you are able.  Did you pick the shoelace?  Is your shoelace long or short?  New or old?  Are the ends intact or frayed?  Is the shoelace dirty?  Set your alarm again and meditate with this same thought over the next several days.  Do not alter the object from session to session.  You want to become adept at holding very specific thoughts for periods of time.  It is okay to view your shoelace or fish from different viewing angles.  However, you want to pick only one item to contemplate.  Stick with it for a few days before moving on.  Then select another object to view in your mind such as the fish.

     After finishing a few sessions contemplating just the shoelace (or fish or leaf), practice thinking of just the color green.  Is your green winter green?  Forest green?  Light green?  Lime green?  See your green in a can of paint swirling as you stir it.  Stretch your green so it is a large blob.  Tighten it up to a super ball size and bounce it on the ground in your mind.  Again, practice thinking about just the color green for several minutes. 

     As you become adept at holding your thoughts, bring a thought into your session that triggers emotion.  Make it a happy emotion, never a negative emotion.   Think about your child’s face, the trophy fish you reeled in, or your new car.  Whatever your thought is it has to make you smile.  Stretch your thought as long as you possibly can.  Remember to smile while you meditate on the thought.  After all, the requirement was to think of something that makes you smile. 

     After you have completed stretching your happy thought, select a thought that calls forth your senses.  Rattle sensory thoughts around in your mind.  Go through each of your five senses:  sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.  Your goal is to pick a thought from each of these categories and stretch it. 

     You can open your eyes for your sense of sight.  Pick a boat in a magazine, your dream house, or a pan of brownies and examine the contents.  Take in the scenery, the color, the texture, the shape and any other details visually that you perceive.  Focus on your target for several minutes before moving on to another sense.  Choose a musical instrument, a train whistle, or the wind for your sense of hearing.  Close your eyes and listen to the sound within the confines of your mind.  Hear its noise.  Stretch this thought as long as possible.  Move on to touch.  Use the thought of your baby’s skin, the roughness of sandpaper, the smoothness of glass.  Move on to taste.  What does raw cinnamon taste like?  What about the sweetness of sugar or the sourness of lemon?  Draw these mental pictures.  Consider what you smell.  Think of a skunk’s odor, the funky animal smell at the zoo, your favorite perfume, or the smell of moth balls.  Stretch each of these thoughts in your mind.  Roll them over and see them.  Hear them.  Touch them.  Taste them.  Smell them all within your mind.

     These exercises strengthen the conscious minds ability to visualize internally imprinting upon the Universal Mind.   You are learning to clarify.   When you construct your ideals, the pictures you need to submit must contain as much sensory data as possible.  Thinking I want an orange.  Seeing the perfectly rich orange color, feeling the waxy pitted peel, smelling the erupting juice squirt as you break it in two, and tasting the sweet flavor of the orange burst within the confines of your mouth is a more powerful image to imprint upon the Universal Mind that just thinking it would be nice to have an orange.  It is with all of your sensory images that you paint the thoughts that produce the most effective outcomes. 

     I want you to practice thinking of in terms of mental sensory images.  This is not something that should consume your thinking or something you should hang on every word.  As opportunity presents itself throughout your day, take a moment or two to call forth very vivid mental pictures.  If someone is telling a funny story, instead of purely listening externally to their yarn, play out its pictures in your mind as they tell it.  Try to imagine the people they describe.  Try seeing the situation.  Hear the laughter erupt in your mind. 

     Go about your day looking for opportunities to imprint your senses mentally.  If someone offers you a chocolate bar, take a moment to consider the smell and taste within your mind, not just what you see and smell physically.  Practice, practice, practice thinking in terms of pictures.  Draw forth as many of your senses as possible as you think.  The value this will provide in just a short period of time will be immeasurable. 

     Nikola Tesla, a great inventor, always visualizes and manipulates within his mind first the perfect embodiment of his desire.  “In this way,” he writes in the Electrical Experimenter, “I am enabled to rapidly develop and perfect a conception without touching anything.  When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of, and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete (form), the product of my brain.  Invariably my device works as I conceived it should; in twenty years there has not been a single exception.”

     Practice thought imagery and stretching well after your practice sessions have ended.  You need to become effective at this.  The only way to master thought direction is by practice.  As you continue, the alarm devices will not be necessary.  However, set them if you feel it helps by all means.  The more frequent attempts you make at these mental practices sessions, the quicker you will get your mind in shape to perform the enticing task of securing your ideals.  Practice, practice, practice!  Your experiences will be delivered in exaction proportion to your efforts.  What goes in must come out.  No efforts in equal no change without

#47 Squeezing Out All Thoughts

Once you are able to feel the presence of your thoughts, the next step is to squeeze them out.  You will proceed as you did above setting an alarm device throughout the day followed up by periods of meditation.  At each alarm interval and mediation session, try to blank out your thoughts.  Think of nothing.  At first this will require much effort.  You will probably only be able to shut thoughts out for brief moments; several seconds to a few minutes.  Continue this practice for several days until you feel comfortable blanking out your mind.  Your goal is to squeeze out thoughts for at least one to several minutes at a time.

     Practice squeezing thoughts out of your conscious mind for several weeks.  Do this regardless of the thought, even if it is one that fulfills you.  Gaining the ability to shut thoughts out, any thoughts, will help you eliminate destructive thoughts.  As you develop the habit of going inside you, you will begin to notice both your feel good thoughts and your feel bad thoughts.  As you detect a destructive thought, your practiced ability will allow you to squeeze it out.  You must practice, however.  If you do not master squeezing thoughts out when destructive thoughts are noticed, it will be very difficult to get your mind off the thoughts.  The Law of Attraction will pepper you with them.  Subsequently, you must be versed at shutting thoughts out.

     These exercises:  Familiarizing yourself with your thoughts and shutting your thoughts out, assist in directing your thoughts.  You will not be able to direct your thoughts until you have mastered the connection within yourself and have developed the ability to squeeze out thoughts. After all, you cannot direct that which you have no control over.  The control must be gained first. 

     Directing your thoughts is done in steps.  Practice is required, much like teaching a child to tie shoes or ride a bike.  It is through instruction and practice that we learn.  If we do not practice we do not fully reap the benefits.  How many people do you know that simply cannot swim?  It is not because they are inept.  It is because they failed to practice.  Anyone can swim if they practice.  Consequently, anyone can learn to direct their thoughts through practice.    

     This is mental work but requires the same regimented rehearsal as any physical activity you would prepare for.  You practice until you learn and you will learn every time.  Every child learns to walk, tie shoes, ride a bike, and read.  Children are sponges of opportunity because we discipline them to practice until the task is accomplished.  We do not dare take the shoes away after a few unsuccessful tying attempts, nor do we stroller children for life who do not walk by the age of one.  We tell our children to keep trying until you learn.  That is why we all know how to ride a bike, tie our shoes and walk.   It is with this diligence that you learn to direct your thoughts. 

     It is important that you ease yourself into thought direction.  You would not teach a child to ride a bike by perching them on a motorcycle.  You would not select an expert course to start skiing.  Do not be tempted to go immediately to hard in thought direction.  Remember, you validate your experiences as proof of truth.  Any failures will be deemed by you as proof of some inability or proof that your thoughts are powerless.  So it is very important that small steps are taken and small successes are celebrated, thereby validating your work as accurate.  Small drips applied gradually increase your water bill tremendously.  It is the same with your thoughts.  Start small, build tall. 

#46 Exploring the Conscious Mind

     By now, your attention should be shifted inward as you notice what you are thinking. You are developing an awareness of at least some of your daily thought habits.  You are also meditating on a regular basis (several times week).  Up to this point, you have made no effort to change your habits or prevent your thoughts.  You have let them roll through your mind unhampered.

     I am going to give you an exercise designed to remind you to inspect inwardly.   Set your wrist watch or cell phone alarm to ring several times a day (resetting each time it goes off for an hour later).  When your reminder alarm sounds, stop!  Jot down exactly what thoughts are present when the alarm sounded.  Make no attempt to embellish the thought or think of something if you cannot recall.  If you do not know or cannot remember your thought, write down I drew a blank.  You will be surprised how quickly the thought leaps from your clutch.  Set your alarm for the next half hour or hour and do the same.  Keep this log for several days.  Your goal is to awaken to your thoughts.  As you progress, you will naturally begin inspecting your thoughts several times a day without the aid of the alarm.  The alarm helps you develop the habit of peeking inside your mind. 

     As you journal your thought log, set aside at least ten minutes to half an hour a day to meditate.  Meditation shuts out the physical world forcing your focus inward.  Meditating is not difficult.  In fact it is relatively easy and should leave you feeling refreshed.  Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed.  Quiet dimly lit rooms work nice.  Sit on a comfortable chair; lay on the floor, or on your bed.  This is mental work and dozing off is not allowed.  Save meditating for a time when you are alert, yet able to relax. 

     Find your comfortable spot.  Close your eyes and let your thoughts flow freely.  Permit them to trail.  Pay attention to the speed at which thoughts “pop” in for a visit.   They come.  They go.  Often thoughts are followed by similar thoughts and clear images.  Other times their randomness distracts from the picture.  Your goal is to familiarize yourself with you.  The only way to know you is to go inside you and feel your presence through your thoughts.  Mediate in this fashion for several days, again making no effort to control your thoughts.  Your goal at this point is self awareness.  Repeat this process of dropping in on your thoughts for several days until you feel connected to the inner you.

     You are not ready to move forward until the connection is felt.  You are a ships captain right now getting familiar with the crew and equipment.  You would make no attempt to sail your vessel without proper acclimation. 

     It is OK to feel overwhelmed by your thoughts; most people do, which is why they tuck them nicely away inside their head and spend time dazzling themselves with their physical acquisitions.  You will never try to control your thoughts sporadic nature.  You will only direct your thoughts towards your ideals as you currently define them.  Directing your thoughts requires that you (1) disarm destructive thoughts and (2) install constructive thoughts.  The rest of your imaginative, spontaneous, unprompted, unstructured thoughts should be left to prowl.

#46 Building a New Foundation

You now have an understanding of the power that resides inside you.  You know you have an insatiable creative purpose that is unleashed through thought.  Thoughts attract like energies binding into beliefs.  From your thoughts and beliefs springs your reality.  You have learned that your beliefs repel thoughts that are not on the same frequency denying access to the universal mind.  Therefore, you cannot create that which betrays your beliefs.  You cannot even fake it. 

     Emotions and Feelings allow you to gauge the relationship between your physical world and your thoughts simply by asking yourself:   How do I feel?   Am I joyful?  Grateful?  Appreciative?  Or am I mad, sad and frustrated?  Thoughts lay the groundwork for feelings.  You feel what you think.  Feelings provide a temperature check for what you are thinking right now.  Feelings steer you towards your ideals if you tune into them.   Your goal is to follow the thoughts that leave you feeling good and abandon the thoughts that leave you feeling bad.  Remember, thoughts that leave you feeling bad are bad leaders.  You do not want to be lead where they are taking you.  It is that simple.

     Ideals give you direction.  They are powerful blueprints.  After all, what would power be without a purpose?  Your purpose is to create the unrestricted vision you hold of yourself in a harmonious state with the Universal Mind.  You will feel fulfilled as you move towards your Ideal.  Your Ideal will always be a moving target.  As you accomplish, so you will endeavor to create more.  Once you understand how you work, all that is necessary is to define what your vision of you is.  

     Clarity is the painted pictures of your ideals.  It is absolutely necessary that you give brush strokes to these pictures.  Clarity combines thoughts and ideals in the same coordinate points within your mind.  The more often you can combine thoughts, beliefs, ideals, and expectancies the quicker your new experience emerges. 

     Expectations serve as check points in your thinking.  By asking yourself, what do I expect to occur this week, you can gage where your thinking has been.  If your ideals are not on that list, then your thinking is not where it needs to be. 

     Your imagination exercises your spontaneous thinking.  You do not need to get an imagination.  You already have one; a really great one!  Sometimes people will use phrases like, you have no imagination.  It is only through lack of use that we fail to rely on our imaginative ability.  Using it is like toning the muscles that lay ready for use under your skin.   Once employed, you will not be able to stop the popping of ideas.

     Finally, you have your misunderstood willpower which is your magnetic energy in motion.  It is the Law of Attraction at work.  Smokers, dieters, and alcoholics are all too familiar with this pull of energy.  It is the ever so powerful cyclical thoughts connecting mental to physical.  The power of your will to draw cannot be avoided. 

     Once you understand each of the working pieces that make up you, it becomes uncomplicated to navigate you.  Easier, make note, not easy.  However, understanding helps!  Before you were afraid to imagine, now you have permission.  Previously you settled, now you idealize.  Yesterday you allowed your thoughts to run amok amidst fret, anger and frustration.  Today, you command them towards abundance joy and harmony.  Where once doubt settled in confidence is restored.  You are in charge of you and always have been.  Creating your ideal vision of you begins right now with thought acquaintance.

     I had the opportunity to visit an annual art show in Grand Rapids, Michigan called Art Prize.  Artists around the world compete for the annual art prize of $1,000.  It was hard to find a piece of art at Art Prize that was not amazing in its creation.

     However, there was a piece that stood out in particular.  An artist by the name of Paul A. Baliker had carved a piece of driftwood into a large circle about fifteen feet in diameter.  The carving contained all sorts of intricate detail such as a carved giraffe, monkeys, and so forth.  He work was called A Matter of Time.  This particular artist was on hand to answer questions about his piece. 

     One of the members of the group admiring the work asked the artist as he stood off to the side, “How do you even begin to build something like this?  It seems so overwhelming to me.”  The artist responded, “I start from the bottom.  I always start from the bottom and I just keep working upwards.” 

#45 EXERCISING YOUR IMAGINIATION

     If you are unsure how to bring your imagination from passive to active, watch a child play.  Children have no trouble at all employing their active imagination.  Give them a ball of yarn and a pile of sticks and they will give you a fort.  “Here’s where the kitchen is,” they will say!  “Yeah, and over here is my room.  My bed is here.  And this big rock is my pillow.”  Children will spend hours setting up battlegrounds, tea parties, or hoeing a make believe garden.  How are they at entrepreneur skills?  There is no reluctance on their part selling crayon pictures, homemade bracelets or cookies that are falling apart.  Do kids dread going door to door to selling their goods?  No, they love going door to door with their cooked up inventions, crayon pictures and mud pies!  Kids believe in their abilities and actively employ their imagination. 

     The world’s most successful people transport their imagination from passive to active:  Movie makers, song writers, novelist, gaming creators, painters, inventors, scientist, entertainers, and magicians.  The top performers in any professional category are always those deemed to have the “wildest” imaginations.  You too, can be imaginative.  All it takes is practice.  What is available to any top performer is also available to you.  As you use your imagination, a dousing of fresh thought trickles in.   

     Shedding limiting beliefs allows your imagination to stretch.  When we shed the belief that man could not fly, we came up will all sorts of vehicles for man to fly in:  airplanes, hot air balloons, helicopter, space shuttle, parachute, and blimps.  It is the belief that bars the ideas entry.  When you clear the path, ideas will spring to mind, one after another, from the easily doable to the absurd.  Do not deny these thoughts their proper consideration. That is your mental power in action trying to bring your desired object close to you.  Denying these thoughts and opportunities is the same as denying your object. 

     Are you familiar with the children’s movies “Finding Nemo” or “Monster, Inc?”  Finding Nemo is about a young fish that is separated from his overprotective and rather paranoid father.  The father must venture out of the safety zone of his coral reef to find his young son.  The story tells the tale of father and sons adventure as they try to find each other.  Monster’s Inc. is a story about Monsters that live in a parallel universe to ours accessible through the closets of children.  The Monsters have to scare children to collect screams.  The screams of children power the Monsters electrical world.  A little girl accidentally enters the monster’s world and the adventure begins. 

     These stories could only be created through active imagination employed regularly.  When you are open to ideas, they come.  When you shut ideas out through your beliefs, they cannot come.  They are denied access by the beliefs.  The only reason you feel a lack of creativity is because you are not letting your thoughts springboard you into ideas like Finding Nemo or Monsters Inc.  You do not permit them.  You walk around oblivious to your thoughts with a big tag across your chest that reads, “Access denied.”

     Your thoughts are worthy of exploration.  If there is ever a time to listen to the knock, knock, knock of your thoughts…the time is now.  Often our brief interludes of constructive thought are followed up with the flickering of attracted thoughts responding.  But we miss the sparking of new thought.  We take no action.   

     Your imagination is tapped through active use.  Take your imagination into your meditation sessions.  Force its use by asking yourself questions out of the ordinary.  Ask yourself questions you would not normally or ever consider.  Examples such as:  What would my world be like if I lived on the leaf of a Sugar Maple Tree?  Would I learn how to access its sap?  What could I use the sap for besides a sweetener?  Ask of yourself, how could I have $10 without laboring for it?  What job do I think is the best job in the world?  In considering this job, what do I think is the most challenging aspect of this “best job?” 

     There are no rules to the questions you ask except that you must either feel good or neutral about the material.  Bring no unpleasantries into your session.  Your imagination will spring up through active frequent use.  If you do not use it, you lose it.  However, you can gain it back.  Your imagination does not pack up and leave you.  You have only suppressed it.  It did not go anywhere.  By suppressing it, imaginative thoughts do not occur to you.  When you use it often, thoughts leap seemingly out of nowhere.

     When you feel in command of your imagination, then you can initiate thoughts of your ideals.  Prematurely setting ideals causes you to aim low.  After all, if your imagination is harnessed like a beast, it will not occur to you that certain ideals are available.  You have likely heard people say, “I never would have thought of that” or “I wish I would have thought of that.”  What are they saying this about?  Just about every good idea that slaps them in the face from the Pet Rock to the Invisible leashed pet.  They said it about Colonel Sanders secret recipe, Martha Stewart’s Life Style entertainment, the slinky, Rubik’s cube, and on and on. 

     Ideals spring from the pursuit of an active imagination.  When you allow yourself to ponder without restriction the ideal life you desire, it too will begin to take shape.  Ideas that would have never occurred to you before will occur.  That is why it is important not to loiter in new found thought.  You should always keep idealizing since your ideal is always relative to where you are now.  It is a moving target.  As you carve your way towards your ideal, thoughts that have not occurred to you before will help you to set new ideals.  You are always moving towards a new set of ideals.  If you linger to long on a tier, beliefs will grip you in that tier.  While some may be beneficial, others will hold you to certain experiences.  That is why it is always important to remember what you believe holds no universal truth.  You do not want new beliefs to mesmerize you in the same regard your old ones do.

     Your imaginative ideas should be as unrealistic as possible for this reason:  What is real, is already believable by you and requires no reinforcement.  Thinking in terms of what is unrealistic and unobtainable stretches your mind.  It forces you to consider thoughts you normally would not.  Once these thoughts are brought into the active mind for inspection other like thoughts will follow including thoughts that make the unobtainable obtainable and the unrealistic real. 

     When Gary Dahl first thought of the Pet Rock, it was amongst friends who were at the time complaining about their pets.  The Pet Rock was a laughable substitute for a pet.  However, Dahl went home to consider the Pet Rock further.  He even went as far as creating a guide on caring for the fictitious Pet Rock.  The more he thought about this very unrealistic pet, the more real it became real.  Ultimately, he put together a marketing plan that successfully launched his pet rock to a welcoming market.  The rest is history.

     Your imagination works well when you use it well!  Creating your ideals through imagination serves as a guide for your thoughts.  Until now, you have allowed your thoughts to wander, snaking off when you perceive them as becoming too unrealistic within your belief system.  Time spent in concentrated effort imagining your ideals draws forth those experiences.  Like the water drip and the fall leaves, small daily doses build up monumental results quickly.   The degree to which you are willing to devote concentrating on your ideals, determines the speed at which your ideals are returned.    Small doses performed daily lead to large immediate results.