28TH DAY

Two more days to go. I'm wondering if any of these messages inspired you to break old habits while forming new ones?  Old habits die hard because they're deeply encoded in the subconscious mind.  It happens so easily that if you're not totally conscious of your daily thoughts and words you won't notice them.  One of the most dangerous habits anyone can have is to speak negatively about money.  Just breaking the habit of saying "I'm broke", or "it costs too much" requires discipline and focus.  Louise Hay, the author of "You Can Heal Your Life", suggests that you ease into changing habits by using the Law of Substitution.  Instead of saying "I'm broke", she said it would be better to train yourself to say  "I don't have the money right now".  Or "when I get the money I'll be able to...".  Louise believes, as we do, that what we think and say becomes true.  I can remember a conversation I had with one of my daughters about going on a cruise.  We had just leafed through a beautiful brochure sent out by a cruise company.  The pictures were inviting, the food on the cruise ship looked delicious, the rooms looked like expensive hotel rooms, the islands were so wonderful with pristine blue waters and tall palm trees.  I closed the brochure and said to her "maybe one day we'll be able to take a cruise".  She corrected me with "when we get the money we'll go for a cruise".  Ok, I thought but when will that happen?  Then days later she came to me with a plan, "Mom, if we start early we can pay for a cruise monthly".  "lets start in January and put something away each month and by August the cruise will be paid up."  And that's exactly what we did. We picked a cruise and figured out the cost and broke it up into monthly amounts and paid for it by August.

MAKE A COMMITMENT AND FOLLOW THROUGH

The idea of making a commitment to pay for a cruise monthly was kinda scary to me. What if something came up that would prevent me from making the monthly payment.

That was my negative rational mind thinking.  Because once we decided we were going on a cruise in August, a way opened up each month for us to make payments.

Who was it that said set your intentions first and the universe will handle the details? But that was exactly what happened for us and I know it works for everyone.  You might not want to take a cruise, but there might be something else you want to do that's important to you.  However once you fix your mind to do it you've taken the first step towards achieving your goal.   We had fun with this and consistently looked through the brochures to remind ourselves why we were making the monthly sacrifice to pay for a cruise.  We gave ourselves something wonderful to look forward to and imagined how it would feel when we arrived in Florida to get on the ship.  Since I was homeschooling my youngest child, I also made this cruise a teaching situation, but putting up maps of the Carribbean, and showing her the direction we would be traveling.  She learned about longitude and latitude, weather, the equator, and I signed her up for a tour of the captains area so she could see the navigational tools they used to get us from point A to point B.  We also found books about the islands we would visit and learned more about the people in each island, their culture and customs.  I went on a strict budget and eliminated unnecessary spending, and actually started using coupons when doing the food shopping. 

IF YOUR MIND CAN PERCEIVE IT YOU CAN ACHIEVE IT

Going on a budget was a new adventure for me.  Previously I just spent money as the situation came up.  Now I was doing comparison shopping, looking for sales and eliminating careless spending.  When we first started this project, a sister friend asked me if we were going to address the whole idea of people taking responsibility for their spending habits.  This is a woman who travels frequently and is always fashionably dressed.  She told me the secret behind all those beautiful clothes she was wearing. She shopped in a consignment store.  Consignment stores sell clothes that were worn before at low prices.  They buy the clothes from people, have them cleaned and resell them.  This woman cooks every day and elminates the expense of eating out. She had three children and the meals she cooks are less expensive and more nutritious then the food sold in fast food restaurants.  She talked to me about the people who will spend hundreds of dollars for a designer purse, or expensive sunglasses or clothes with labels.  We agreed that these people look good from the outside, but inwardly they've bought into the group mind consciousness that says if it has a label in it, it's worth it. 

SPEND WITHIN YOUR MEANS

So does going on a budget, doing comparison shopping, or buying used clothes keep us stuck in a poverty consciousness?  Not at all.  It just means that you're being more responsible with what you have and you're also getting unstuck from the group mind consciousness that tells you it's better if you pay more for it.  Then if you do that you can afford to do something like take a cruise, or buy a better car because you'll be more mindful of how you spend your money.  When you adopt the mindset of saving money and going on a budget, you won't be so easily tempted to run out and buy the latest electronic gadget , smart phone or blackberry when you know the money isn't there to pay for it.  So you max out your credit cards and load yourself up with unnecessary debt.  The idea of opting out of the group mind consciousness that needs to be accepted or that tries to live up to the good opinion of others makes you stronger.  What does it matter to you if everyone is doing it, or everyone is wearing it?

Large corporations depend on people who can't think for themselves to buy their wares, that's why they spend millions on commercials as an attempt to control our minds.  I thought it was funny that the media kept commenting on the fact that Michelle Obama was wearing a dress that she wore before.  I'm sure she could have afforded to buy a new dress to wear when her husband won the election.  But the attitude (which I love) was why should I?  She had only worn that dress one time before, it was still pretty and she looked good in it.  The hidden message was "I've opted out of the group mind", and "my opinion of who I am is more important than anyone else's opinion of who I am"  WhooHoo!  It's all good.  THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: I SPEND WISELY AND SAVE CONSCIOUSLY