Lemons, Mara, and Love.

We have such an amazing group of women in WOW. WoWettes, as a new friend calls us. People say it's terrific that I have created this group, and I think I just rolled the ball and the ball kept rolling, that's how easy it was to bring these ladies into my life. They are beautiful, smart, kind, and fun, this lovely group. It's like there is magic in my life, how this group keeps going and growing and how guests just fit right in and how much joy it all brings me.

I've never really understood how it was so easy to create something as pleasurable as WOW until I met tonight's speaker. We had the pleasure of having our monthly potluck and speaker meeting with Mara Brown of www.marabrown.com. She has done the things I've always dreamed of, such as having a TV show, a radio show, and authoring three books. And what was her topic? How to make our dreams come true. Not in a feel-good sort of way, but in a practical, speak-to-my-heart kind of way that made sense. Her topic was The Secret Behind the Secret. The Secret is this video and disc and other commercial stuff, preaching the message that all we have to do to obtain whatever we want is to think it and feel it and then we will attract it. Sounds easy? Yep, if that was all there was to do.

But our Mara is wiser than that. She agrees that we will get more of what we think about and feel, but reminds us that our thinking and feelings are colored and influenced by our belief systems. So we can think that we want love and fortune and happiness, but if our inner script says that we are destined to fail, then we will fail, no matter what our thinking says. She says that our ideas about the world and about ourselves are formed by the time we are three years old, which is rather shocking. Some of us were raised by parents who taught us by their actions and words that we were not valuable or that we were stupid or that we were not wanted. And that creates our attitude and feelings about ourself, so we grow up and fail and seek out situations to prove again and again that we are failures. She says that we actualize what we believe, those often hidden inner scripts that run our lives. Her idea is that we have to seek out what the messages are and change them to messages that will allow us to have abundance, love, peace, and joy.

She really spoke to me, this lovely woman who clearly wants us to be happy and live rich lives. And she talked about ways in which we get "stuck" and unable to cast aside those negative messages, such as when we don't forgive, either someone else or ourselves. Lack of forgiveness keeps us in a self-perpetuating prison of our own making - forgiveness frees us and the person we resent. Living in the energy of resentment is like drinking poison and wishing the other person will die, like picking up a burning ember in our bare hands to throw it at someone else. We forget, she says, that we must let go and that forgiving doesn't mean condoning the behavior, it just allows us to stop trying to open a closed door and find the open door just waiting for us to enter and find joy.

She also talked about our physiology, how we can create the energy in our actual bodies, either for unhappiness or joy. Think of the person who is sulking with his head down versus the person standing tall, shoulders back, with a big silly grin on his face. Mara says that our mind cannot tell the difference between the real and the imagined, like thinking of biting into a lemon and then salivating or visualizing standing at the edge of the roof of a tall building and feeling fear. So we can direct our feelings by our posture and our expressions. Amazing stuff.

Hearing Mara reminded me that I've spent considerable time in the past few years figuring out what are my destructive hidden scripts, and I've spent even more time telling myself positive messages to contradict the negative. Wow must be the proof that The Secret really does work, since my recent positive attitude about myself has allowed me to attract these wonderful and amazing women into my life. Magic does happen and I thank Mara for reminding all of us that we can create it ourselves. By what we believe. And what we choose to stop believing.