It’s been already a few days that I had this idea that what I need to feel better is some kind of radical positive thinking and connecting with my intuition. I initially wanted to sign up for Feminine Power course but I’m having issues with spending $1k if I don’t really know what it is. Also, I saw an ad where a couple of women share how the course changed their life but they’re all anonymous. One says, smiling and happy, that she never thought she’d become international bestseller author, she never even wanted to write a book, and I’m thinking, who is she then? What did she write? And I think, I’m sorry, something dodgy is going on there.

Yes, so Feminine Power needs to be eliminated but I need something else. What came to my mind is how the book ‘The Power of your subconscious mind’ by Joseph Murphy made me feel when I was in my early 20s. If you never heard of Joseph Murphy, you probably heard of The Secret. You know, all those New Age things that are meant to bring you wealth and happiness as long as you think about them for long enough. Ideas like that were not popular in my country so when I saw that book in the library, I didn’t know what to expect. But when I bought it and started reading, I thought if this has been published, it must be true so I started doing the exercises and they made me feel so much better, I was relaxed and positive every single day. And only, after a few weeks, I realised the wealth wasn’t materialising and anyway, it would be silly to expect that it would, wouldn’t it? If it was so easy, everyone would be rich, we would have no cleaners and possibly very few bus drivers and construction workers as no one would want to do those job. So I rejected the idea together with the exercises.

Now, as I browse through self help books on Amazon I can’t find anything that would provide way to think positively without the promise of it bringing enormous change into our lives. If I want to be realistic I have mindfulness. But mindfulness is focused on here and now. And what if my here and now is all about ‘how am I going to cope now, when my mum died? The future is blank, nothing positive is ever going to happen to me. Nothing at all is ever going to happen to me, I’ll just spend the rest of my life in bed.’ I’m sorry, but this is what I am thinking. And focusing on this thought doesn’t make it go away at all. It’s not about mood, it’s the lack of social imagination that does that to me. I just can’t imagine the future, it’s so bad that I almost believe nothing ever is going to happen to me at all.

So I am thinking, what if we tried techniques from Joseph Murphy book but without the expectation that the great things are going to happen to us only because we thought about them?

The techniques are basically visualisations: you sit or lie down in a quiet place where no one disturbs you, relax with some meditation techniques and then you visualise desired outcome. The desired outcome doesn’t need to be wealth. It can be my life in 90 days, that is as normal as it used to be before my mum died, new job, going to the gym (if you can’t find motivation othetwise) or being confident on a date.

I think that is something that could really work for us if that New Age vibe gets taken away. However, there’s no book on that: you either have The Secret type positive thinking or being radically realistic. And I don’t want to be in a situation where read a book but reject half of it’s concepts and only work with the other half. My mind wouldn’t like that at all.