The Joy of Focus

I've had a surprisingly enlightening and beneficial experience I'd like to share with you.
I had a dream that a huge rattlesnake was about to bite my face and I was paralyzed with fright and unable to move away.
I awoke with vivid feelings of utter powerlessness.

What on earth? I can't believe I have anything close to powerless feelings in my life, let alone powerless feelings that were repetitive enough to manifest in a dream.

I thought about my recent emotional life and could admit that I hadn't been feeling great for the last couple of weeks. Great is how I normally feel, so "not great" is quite a departure for me.

I could pinpoint a sense of boredom, which, any way you slice it, is out of the vortex.  But that's not powerlessness...

I noticed I had been filling my days with seemingly enjoyable activities: hiking while listening to seminars on my iPod, cleaning house while listening to seminars on my iPod, watching uplifting TV like Ellen and Funniest Home Videos, but also "interesting" TV, like Real Housewives and Project Runway which have lots of stress and drama, also time was spent reading fun, humorous books.
Why, while I was doing all these things I enjoyed did I end up feeling powerless?
Because I had left out time for intentional thought, and by doing so I had relinquished my power.

During that 2 weeks, I found myself feeling "not good" repeatedly.  Since I'm so accustomed to feeling good, feeling "not good" feels absolutely awful to me.

I had begun to question my current ability to focus myself into feeling good.  Because, one, I had been relying on (relinquishing my power to) things to see and hear and experience to feel good, and two, I didn't feel so good.
Also, the more I felt bad, the more I noticed my seeming inability to feel good in a sustained way again which resulted in frustration, then impatience, then self-criticism.

By the way, as you keep expanding every day, by noticing things you don't want and launching new preferences, you have to keep up with that expansion.  The only way to keep up with expansion is by intentional focused thoughts that make you feel good.

My time was filled with thinking passively in response to what I was hearing or seeing.  I was still intending to do only those things that felt good, but I had gradually begun to rely on observing things that felt good rather than generating my own thoughts.  I hadn't really noticed that the feeling that kept arising was boredom.  Boredom is the outside the vortex. (see the Vibrational Scale)

And because I'm a bit of an overachiever, I was kicking my own ass for being outside the vortex.  That's a surefire way to make it impossible to get back in.

What I love is that if you ignore a negative emotion, over time it will get bigger until you can't help but notice it.
It wasn't until I had a petrifying dream of complete powerlessness that I noticed the pattern of relinquishing control of directed thought, boredom, discomfort, more discomfort...

That dream was such a gift.  Thank you for telling me that I had slipped into a pattern of being led by the nose by things I was observing, then becoming self-critical and powerless over how I was feeling!

I had decided I would stop watching TV or reading or listening to tapes every hour in order to do something quiet for the next hour to exercise my thoughts toward appreciation and love and passion and wonder and desires.

Then something wonderful happened.  As soon as I made that decision, the cable went out.  For two days I was in a blissful state.  I still read for an hour here or there, I still listened to tapes for a little while here and there, but for the majority of the time I got to get reacquainted with the power and thrill of my own thoughts.