What are your experiences with the Power/Law of Attraction?

kickarykee

Hi everybody,

Some time ago my life coach introduced me to the Law of Attraction and how it works and how it can influence my life for the better.
For everyone who has never heard of it: Basically it states that the human mind has a strong influence on reality/the future by focussing energies, so if you concentrate on something specific, something positive, it will be attracted into your life, while living in misery and focussing on what's bad in your life will attract even more bad into it.
I've been taught some great exercises by Moayad and I get the impression actively doing them has changed a great deal (for the better!) in my life over the past few months (I changed my job for one I like way more than the old one, I earn more money now, I lost weight, which I wanted forever and a day ...), so I've been wondering whether any of you have also had similar experiences? Has anyone ever actually tried to use the LOA before?
Looking forward to your replies!

sadie9

I wouldn't consider the Law of Attraction to be in any way related to the science of Psychology, which is data and evidence based.
The LOA is a belief rather than anything else, so I guess you may get more response in the Religion & Spirituality section of the Boards.

kickarykee

Thanks for the hint ... maybe a mod can move it?
I wouldn't want to double post ...

Valmont

OP, considering you posted this I'm assuming you're open to criticism. I don't understand how anyone can try to live by this idea when it makes so little sense. It amounts to the idea that wishful thinking will get you places, right? I can only see that ending in disappointment for anyone willing to try it.

coraline

Hi everybody!

I´m new in this forum, but I´m very intersting in this topic!
@valmont: you are asking how anyone could live with this idea and it will end in disappointment! LOA has got nothing to do with wishful thinking! It is about focussing your mind to the goals you want to achieve! Maybe you know the effect from sports: when you are convinced to succeed you will, when you are convinced to fail, that will happen too! So that is an example for LOA!
There are scientific experiments (quantum physic, noetic) which prove, that thoughts are energie and can be measured. And anything that has got mass has also got gravity!
Noetic is a very new science but never the less fascinating! And people who seriously work with it, know from their experience that it really works!
If you got interested to learn more about this, here are a few links:

www.noeticsciencesforum.com
www.nakedhealer.com
www.successconsciouness.com

kickarykee

Thanks for your input on this - to both of you

@Valmont:
From what I got so far it's not so much about wishful thinking than thoughts being energy that influences different energies and thus attracts them. There was this experiment where they shouted different things at water molecules (swearwords in some cases, aggressive stuff, nice things in others, etc.) and took pictures - and the water that had been treated "nicely" showed beautiful patterns while the other showed chaotic ones. I do believe it works to some extent, I'm just trying to find out how much of it you can actually apply in life.

@coraline:
Thanks for the links - I'll have a look at them

Joe1919

kickarykee wrote: »

Hi everybody,

..... Basically it states that the human mind has a strong influence on reality/the future by focussing energies, so if you concentrate on something specific, something positive, it will be attracted into your life, while living in misery and focussing on what's bad in your life will attract even more bad into it.

I can see a similarity between what you have to say and some modern psychology e.g.
Dr. Phil
Life Law #2: You create your own experience.

Strategy: Acknowledge and accept accountability for your life. Understand your role in creating results.

......... You are creating the situations you are in and the emotions that flow from those situations.......

......... If you choose thoughts contaminated with anger and bitterness, then you will create an experience of alienation and hostility. When you start choosing the right behavior and thoughts - which will take a lot of discipline - you'll get the right consequences.

http://www.drphil.com/articles/article/44

Any thoughts?

fatmammycat

kickarykee wrote: »

Thanks for your input on this - to both of you

@Valmont:
From what I got so far it's not so much about wishful thinking than thoughts being energy that influences different energies and thus attracts them. There was this experiment where they shouted different things at water molecules (swearwords in some cases, aggressive stuff, nice things in others, etc.) and took pictures - and the water that had been treated "nicely" showed beautiful patterns while the other showed chaotic ones. I do believe it works to some extent, I'm just trying to find out how much of it you can actually apply in life.

@coraline:
Thanks for the links - I'll have a look at them

I would like the link to this experiment please.

coraline

fatmammycat wrote: »

I would like the link to this experiment please.

Hi!

Here you can read more about it - it´s really fascinating! :-)

http://www.whatthebleep.com/crystals/

Nevyn

I think it is a very lame rehashing of hermeticism, which has been dumbed down and mass sold to people, unfortunatly the has happened to a lot of the things which are labeled 'new age'.

I would say that people are better of reading the The Kybalion.
The new tought movement was intrsting shame it brough about the new age movment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kybalion

fatmammycat

coraline wrote: »

Hi!

Here you can read more about it - it´s really fascinating! :-)

http://www.whatthebleep.com/crystals/

Hold on here, where is the scientific experiment? The double blind? Clean water and dirty water have different properties? No way, shocking. Water from the tap in the kitchen here has different properties to water from my mother's well. It has nothing to do with emotional content. Soil in my garden is different from soil in my friend's garden, can I take a photo of it, say I yelled at it and thus prove my soil reacted to my anger?
I'm going to go out on a wild guess and suggest that this 'finding' ( that water is affected by emotional energy or thoughts) has never been tested in a real lab and found to be true.

fatmammycat

Ugh, actually forget it, I should have know, a quick google on this man proves beyond a doubt another charlatan, he's not even a real doctor. How disappointing.

"Then he really got into the swing of pseudoscience, simplifying matters by just writing words — in any language, of course — on pieces of paper and taping them to a clear glass container to see if anything happened. Positive words like "love" and "thank you" produced beautiful and delicate crystalline patterns, we're told. He tried "You Make Me Sick. I Will Kill You" and he observed distorted, frightening, muddied patterns. We show here the pattern produced by this last phrase. He even experimented with names like "Gandhi," "Mother Teresa," and "Hitler," and the same kind of results occurred. Wow, again!

And, not to our surprise, Dr. Emoto discovered that the water crystals dutifully form up in response to different ethnic versions of the languages impressed upon them. Here's the expression "thank you" in both Japanese and English. You can see the distinct variations, can't you?

Well, if that didn't convince you that Dr. Emoto might not have both oars in the water, try this, a quotation from him in answer to his thoughts on what the crystals are: "I came to the realization that these crystals are spirits." Okay. Where's the door….? "

Indeed.

Edit: Good lord, he's not even a scientist, although he likes to use the word. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto

fontanalis

fatmammycat wrote: »

Hold on here, where is the scientific experiment? The double blind? Clean water and dirty water have different properties? No way, shocking. Water from the tap in the kitchen here has different properties to water from my mother's well. It has nothing to do with emotional content. Soil in my garden is different from soil in my friend's garden, can I take a photo of it, say I yelled at it and thus prove my soil reacted to my anger?
I'm going to go out on a wild guess and suggest that this 'finding' ( that water is affected by emotional energy or thoughts) has never been tested in a real lab and found to be true.

Sounds like pure woo woo!

theg81der

Well it can`t hurt as long as people don`t sit there and do nothing and expect good things to just happen for them.

Unwilling

@Coraline

I believe ya hun - and put it this way , how can positive thinking HURT YA!

I am not sure WHERE you are but there is a seminar in Dublin next week I was gonna go but was a bit chicken.........PM me if you are interested!

Ciao

roosh

fatmammycat wrote: »

Ugh, actually forget it, I should have know, a quick google on this man proves beyond a doubt another charlatan, he's not even a real doctor. How disappointing.

"Then he really got into the swing of pseudoscience, simplifying matters by just writing words — in any language, of course — on pieces of paper and taping them to a clear glass container to see if anything happened. Positive words like "love" and "thank you" produced beautiful and delicate crystalline patterns, we're told. He tried "You Make Me Sick. I Will Kill You" and he observed distorted, frightening, muddied patterns. We show here the pattern produced by this last phrase. He even experimented with names like "Gandhi," "Mother Teresa," and "Hitler," and the same kind of results occurred. Wow, again!

And, not to our surprise, Dr. Emoto discovered that the water crystals dutifully form up in response to different ethnic versions of the languages impressed upon them. Here's the expression "thank you" in both Japanese and English. You can see the distinct variations, can't you?

Well, if that didn't convince you that Dr. Emoto might not have both oars in the water, try this, a quotation from him in answer to his thoughts on what the crystals are: "I came to the realization that these crystals are spirits." Okay. Where's the door….? "

Indeed.

Edit: Good lord, he's not even a scientist, although he likes to use the word. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto

I think he is merely a photographer, and he admitted to being selective with the pics he used i.e. not all the pics showed such beatufiul crystalisations for the positive words, and not all the crystallisations were so negative for the negative words. He just selected the pics to suit the hypothesis.

Ambersky

There has been a whole book written
Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich
about how the cult of Positive Thinking has hurt just about all of us.
(In writing this I was replying to a post which was saying, sure positive thinking could do no harm and which was asking, anyway how could it hurt, but now I cant see that post, oh well, its a common belief so I'll continue. )

I have already written here on my own opinions on the so called secret - which is no secret- but would like to post this article from the guardian as it is much more concise and articulate. This is the link to that article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/10/smile-or-die-barbara-ehrenreich

ALso here is a link to a rather long but excellent video of Barbara Ehrenreich herself talking on this subject
http://fora.tv/2010/01/11/Smile_or_Die_The_Tyrany_of_Positive_Thinking

Ehrenreich came to her critique of the multi-billion-dollar positive-thinking industry – a swamp of books, DVDs, life coaches, executive coaches and motivational speakers – in similar misery-making circumstances to those I experienced.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer and, like me, found herself increasingly disturbed by the martial parlance and "pink" culture that has come to surround the disease. My response when confronted with the "positive attitude will help you battle and survive this experience" brigade was to rail against the use of militaristic vocabulary and ask how miserable the optimism of the "survivor" would make the poor woman who was dying from her breast cancer.......

I had long suspected that improved survival rates for women who had breast cancer had absolutely nothing to do with the "power" of positive thinking. For women diagnosed between 2001 and 2006, 82% were expected to survive for five years, compared with only 52% diagnosed 30 years earlier. The figures can be directly related to improved detection, better surgical techniques, a greater understanding of the different types of breast cancer and the development of targeted treatments. Ehrenreich presents the evidence of numerous studies demonstrating that positive thinking has no effect on survival rates and she provides the sad testimonies of women who have been devastated by what one researcher has called "an additional burden to an already devastated patient".

Pity, for example, the woman who wrote to the mind/body medical guru Deepak Chopra: "Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back. Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps re-occurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude."

As Ehrenreich goes on to explain, exhortations to think positively – to see the glass as half-full even when it lies shattered on the floor – are not restricted to the pink-ribbon culture of breast cancer. She roots America's susceptibility to the philosophy of positive thinking in the country's Calvinist past and demonstrates how, in its early days, a puritanical "demand for perpetual effort and self-examination to the point of self-loathing" terrified small children and reduced "formerly healthy adults to a condition of morbid withdrawal, usually marked by physical maladies as well as inner terror".

It was only in the early 19th century that the clouds of Calvinist gloom began to break and a new movement began to grow that would take as fervent a hold as the old one had. It was the joining of two thinkers, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, in the 1860s that brought about the formalisation of a post-Calvinist world-view, known as the New Thought Movement. A new type of God was envisaged who was no longer hostile and indifferent, but an all-powerful spirit whom humans had merely to access to take control of the physical world.

Middle-class women found this new style of thinking, which came to be known as the "laws of attraction", particularly beneficial. They had spent their days shut out from any role other than reclining on a chaise longue, denied any opportunity to strive in the world, but the New Thought approach and its "talking therapy" developed by Quimby opened up exciting new possibilities. Mary Baker Eddy, a beneficiary of the cure, went on to found Christian Science. Ehrenreich notes that although this new style of positive thinking did apparently help invalidism or neurasthenia, it had no effect whatsoever on diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis and cholera – just as, today, it will not cure cancer.

Thus it was that positive thinking, the assumption that one only has to think a thing or desire it to make it happen, began its rapid rise to influence. Today, as Ehrenreich shows, it has a massive impact on business, religion and the world's economy. She describes visits to motivational speaker conferences where workers who have recently been made redundant and forced to join the short-term contract culture are taught that a "good team player" is by definition "a positive person" who "smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical and gratefully submits to whatever the boss demands". These are people who have less and less power to chart their own futures, but who are given, thanks to positive thinking, "a world-view – a belief system, almost a religion – that claimed they were, in fact, infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds."

And none was more susceptible to the lure of this philosophy than those self-styled "masters of the universe", the Wall Street bankers. Those of us raised to believe that saving up, having a deposit and living within one's means were the way to proceed and who wondered how on earth the credit crunch and the subprime disasters could have happened need look no further than the culture that argued that positive thinking would enable anyone to realise their desires. (Or as one of Ehrenreich's chapter headings has it, "God wants you to be rich".)

Ehrenreich's work explains where the cult of individualism began and what a devastating impact it has had on the need for collective responsibility. We must, she says, shake off our capacity for self-absorption and take action against the threats that face us, whether climate change, conflict, feeding the hungry, funding scientific inquiry or education that fosters critical thinking. She is anxious to emphasise that she does "not write in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness… and the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking". Her book, it seems to me, is a call for the return of common sense and, I'm afraid, in what purports to be a work of criticism, I can find only positive things to say about it. Damn!

abrahamhicks

Has anyone read any of Bruce Lipton's work? The Biology of Belief shows how our beliefs shape our physical experience - even our DNA!

Did anyone go see him in Dublin recently?

<snip>

abrahamhicks

kickarykee wrote: »

so I've been wondering whether any of you have also had similar experiences? Has anyone ever actually tried to use the LOA before?
Looking forward to your replies!

Yes - it works! When you change the way you think about things and always choose the better feeling thought things seem to fall into place. I've had similar experiences with a job and so many other areas in my life. As my login suggests I'm a huge fan of Esther Hicks and the Abraham teachings - their Dublin workshop was a turning point in my life. It makes no difference to me whether someone believes in LOA or not - that's their path and this is mine (and I'm having a lot of fun on mine!)

fontanalis

abrahamhicks wrote: »

Has anyone read any of Bruce Lipton's work? The Biology of Belief shows how our beliefs shape our physical experience - even our DNA!

Did anyone go see him in Dublin recently?

<snip>

I'm sure the words quantum and meta feature alot!