Satisfaction Is The Doorway To Abundance
For us to be able to distinguish scarcity between abundance, we should realize that the energy inside all of us is what starts everything in our lives. There is interconnectedness coming from all these energies that has a domino effect in all the relationships that we have in life. So when Christy Whitman feels anger, resentment or disappointment, she chooses to own these emotions and choose to look for things that she should be grateful for during those moments. From this gratitude comes satisfaction, which is the doorway to abundance. This abundance creates jobs and also opportunities for people to look for that space of right and good.
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Satisfaction Is The Doorway To Abundance with Christy Whitman
I’m happy to be here. I woke up at 4:30 AM, my eyes wide open, I had stuff on my mind which is a little unusual for me. Normally, when I begin the day, I have my morning ritual, and I get right into that practice where I don’t look at emails or get too much in my head about business early but I broke that rule. I could feel I was less present or a little shaky even. I didn’t know whether that was the coffee or it was something else. I determined it wasn’t the coffee. It was me just not getting in that quiet space, being in my heart early before the day gets going. It’s our daughter Eden’s first day of her junior year of high school, and she’s the last one in our house to be going through high school. It was beautiful. I put on my salmon-colored pants which is our little tradition. I have these ugly-ass salmon pants that I’ve been wearing. On the first day in school, I would come out to the school bus and embarrass all of our kids with these freaking pants. I’m still doing it and that was a blast. Wherever you are, I hope you are in a great space because I’ve got a great, amazing, beautiful individual that I get to share with you. She’s much more than a guest. She’s a friend. We have a lot of interest in common. She appreciates life and the important things of life, like this breath that we’re taking right now. It’s so sacred. There are people everywhere right now who are taking their very last breath. To be in this moment, wherever we’re meeting you, whatever you’re doing, it’s beautiful to share our breaths. It’s a happy day.
Her name is Christy Whitman and she’s just a divine being. She’s been doing lovely work in the world, helping people in such an authentic and impactful way for a lot of years. She’ll share what’s important about her that she would like you to know, and then we’re going to get right into the juicy pivot stuff that everybody loves so much. We’ll circle it all up at the end with some practices to keep going, to be more resilient and to be able to pivot forward in life.
Without further ado, my dear friend, Christy Whitman. Hi, Christy.
Hi, Adam. You have me in tears with the breath and all the beautiful things you’re saying about me. Thank you. I’m very touched. I’m happy to be here with you.
You spend part of the year in Arizona and part of the year in the beautiful Montreal, Québec, Canada, which is where you are now, right?
I am. I designed my life with my husband years ago. He said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to spend half the year in Arizona and half the year in Montreal?” His family is here and my family is there. Plus, we’re chasing really good weather. I don’t want to be in Arizona in the summer and I don’t want to be in Montreal in the winter. It perfectly pairs with each other that when it starts getting really bad weather in Arizona we come to Montreal, and if it starts getting bad here we go to Arizona. It’s a nice cycle that we are in.
Would you share a little bit about yourself?
You’re asking me to share what’s important and I could talk about the roles that I play. I’m a mom of two boys: One is almost seven, the other one is eight. They’re crazy and I love them. I’m a wife. I’m in a very passionate marriage. It wasn’t always like that. We had to work at that but now we can breathe into it and going, “Wow.” We are more in love than we’ve ever been. We’re going on ten years of marriage. We had to work out his stuff and my stuff and we came together perfectly matched. We had to work it out. Now, we’re both in a free abundant space with each other which is great. We will always have more work to do. At the core of everything, I’m a student. I’m a student of life. I’m a student of universal laws. I’m not the same person that I used to be. I almost have a hard time relating with my family a lot of the times because I’ve changed so much in who I am now. I’m a student and then I teach what I learn. For example, with the universal laws, I will share an example, something that I was working with and struggling with moving through in my own life. I just share my experience. That’s how I teach. I’m not one to tell people what they should do or give advice to somebody. I just say, “This is what I did.This is how I understand the universal laws and this is how I apply it.” I’ve been living an awesome life doing it. I just feel so blessed that what I get to do as a career, as a place of creative expression, is so prosperous and lucrative and yet so succinct and spot on aligned for me. I just feel blessed.
Are you working on a book?
I don’t work on a book. I have the book work through me. Whenever I’ve written any of my books, literally, it downloads through me. I’ve had two books that hit the New York Times. I have my literary agent going, “When is your next book? What are you going to create?” I’m like, “I can’t write like that.” I can’t just go, “I’m going to write a story or a book about this.” The divine just goes, “Here’s your assignment,” and I feel like the vessel that gets to birth it. For whatever reason, I literally have four projects. You’ve got to space it out because publishers don’t want everything coming out all at once. I just turned in my manuscript for Quantum Success. It’s really taking the universal laws, specifically the law of attraction, the law of sufficiency and abundance, and applying it towards your career to be able to create the vision of what you want your career to do for you.
For me years ago, I was a pharmaceutical rep. I’m making great money but I had no passion and I had absolutely no sense of purpose. I went against who I was as a human being. If I get a headache, I’m going to go take some lavender essential oil drops and put in on my head rather than go take an Advil. I do things more natural. If I have a kink somewhere, I go get a massage or go get a Reiki healing. This is how I live my life. For me to go into a doctor’s office and have them prescribe more drugs and have to talk about the side effects, “It will help this,” but then sudden death and all this other current stuff, I just felt so split. The big thing for me is I wanted to feel aligned and on purpose. I wanted to be passionate about what I was doing. It was around that time that my book just downloaded through me, my first book, Perfect Pictures, and it’s been doing it ever since.
They always seem to come when I go on a cruise ship. This is actually the book that I just turned in. It was 3:00 AM, wide open and I’m hearing the voice. I’m like, “Really?”It’s never convenient. It’s not like, “It’s 12:00 PM, let’s download.” I’m literally crouched in the bathroom, sitting on the cold floor while the rest of my family is sleeping on a cruise ship, writing and writing and writing for hours. That’s when it just happens to come through to me. I don’t know when it’s going to come, but I just say, “If you must.”
This is an important topic in so many ways because to be present is a big topic. Corporate executives, CEOs of major companies, and Walgreens have created a multi-million dollar wellness program for their employees. Mindfulness is not new. Thank goodness it’s getting its due. What’s it for? I don’t know that there’s a lot of description of where you apply presence and spiritual practice. I know what presence means for me. It’s practicing the presence of God and being in prayer or being in stillness. It’s a different thing that I’m looking for there. I’m looking for connection. Presence, when it’s not tied to spirituality, isn’t well-defined. What’s the value in it? Great athletes for example, and not just great athletes but it’s more often associated with it, an athlete that gets into a flow state, that gets out of their head, when they’re playing, they’re out of their mind.
They’re in the zone. That’s presence and access to the innate talent, the capability, the infinite capability that we have. I was re-reading a book from so many years ago called The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey, a great and incredible book. It’s a personal development book as much as it’s a book about how to play great tennis. It’s all an inside out game which is life. I was like, “What do you do with presence?” Part of presence was to be listening and how it is that you can listen. The voice in your head is quiet, not necessarily chattering or worrying or criticizing, so that at 3:00 AM, if you get called to action, to get the whisper, that you can be present to that and go, “I’m about to get up out of bed and go crouch down in a tight little bathroom in a cruise ship and just write.” On the other end of that is a book. It’s important for me and for everybody to be reminded that when we’re present, sometimes we get directed. “What’s my assignment?” Sometimes that assignment will take you off in a direction that you don’t expect and it’s not something you’d even predict necessarily.
For me, when you were talking about athletes, I think of Michael Jordan in the heyday when they were in the three-peat stage with the Chicago Bulls. I was living in Chicago at the time, it was amazing. I remember watching him on TV, and he could do no wrong. He would get three pointers and he’s looking at the camera like, “I don’t know what’s going on.”
For me, we have to be able to slow down enough to be able to feel ourselves. With the work that I do and where I have come from, is the understanding that everything is energy. If we want to affect and deliberately create our lives the way we want to, we have to be aware of the energy that we’re sending out. That means we have to be aware, we have to check in and go, “What thought am I thinking?” If I’m feeling bad all of a sudden, and I was feeling good before, “What thought brought me into that feeling place that all of a sudden dragged me down?”To be able to self-regulate in that way, we have to be present with ourselves to even be able to do that. The key to even working with the universal laws, to even say, “Am I in the connection and alignment with abundance right now?” we have to be able to connect with ourselves and be present with ourselves. If we’re present with ourselves, then everything else, we can be present with. If I’m not present and connected to myself, I can’t be present and connected to my husband or my kids or a client.
[Tweet “We have to be able to slow down enough to be able to feel ourselves.”]
We can’t give anything. We all want to give. Everybody has a generous, giving heart. I don’t care who it is. Nobody’s born selfish. We can’t give anything we don’t have. If you don’t understand self-love, how do you love anybody? You do love people, but your version of loving someone is the version of how you love yourself. Your self-judgment becomes the judgment that is your projection and what you mirror out into the world.
Everything starts inside of us. Whether it’s a relationship with money, we think it’s outside of ourselves or we’re frustrated we don’t have enough or maybe we have enough but we want to make more, all of that starts with every single relationship. We are in relationship with everything in this universe because everything is energy, everything carries a vibration. It’s all interconnected. The thoughts I think about my mother, if I’m holding negative thoughts about her and I don’t shift or pivot into a different way of thinking about her, she cannot not show up differently in my life. If I am thinking that the guy that just cut me off in traffic is a total jerk and I hold that inside of me, I’m going to continue to drive around with jerks because I’m holding this inside of me. All relationships and everything that’s affected starts with us. That’s where the things I’ve had to do a lot of healing and work on within myself, is because I was very filled with lack. I never felt like I was enough. I never ever felt good enough. I never felt pretty enough. I never felt I had enough money or that I have this or that. It was all rooted in lack which you find in most people. It’s the Achilles heel for most people because we’re just seeped in it in our society. I stopped judging myself so much and went, “I was allowed to make mistakes. I don’t have to be perfect.” I saw my dad do that. He was a mechanical engineer, brilliant guy, but if he ever made a mistake, he did let himself have it.
If I ever got hurt as a kid, I remember one time I flipped over my ten-speed bike and I came home and I had this big scab on my forehead, my dad took one look at me and he goes, “You f’d up your face,” and he starts yelling. I got in trouble for getting hurt. There were no mistakes allowed to be made. We had to be perfect. I learned that from the master. Inside of myself, when I would make a mistake, would I let myself have it and beat myself up? What came in here translated out there? If it was a boyfriend or a husband or whatever, thank God I was able to heal that before I had kids; that came out as a judgment and as a criticism. “As within, so without.” It’s not just a saying, it’s true.
The betrayal that when you think somebody is going to betray you, they often do, for that same reason. We’re projecting ourselves out into the world and then the world reflects that experience back to us. That’s the out picturing of that inside, those thoughts and those feelings, etc. There’s a great book that I’m referring out a lot these days. It’s called The Presence Process by Michael Brown, which is a beautiful book that explores that, “Where do those things start?” Lots of people have self-sabotage. They get it that it’s their own doing. They own it. It’s like the first page of the personal development handbook, “You own your life. You’re responsible for everything.” What can I do with that? It’s like, “How do I stop it? How do I change it?”
The consciousness is so important. The intention to change something is so important. There’s also stuff going on that we don’t yet understand and aren’t aware of. I love that book for that purpose. This is a real great exploration back to childhood and a story like the one you just communicated. That’s such a visceral experience of what perfection looks like or what it means to avoid making mistakes at all costs. On top of the mistake, it also means judgment, disapproval, not being enough, and love being conditional.
The first domino these days for me, is unconditional love for yourself, self-love. To get to that place of self-love, we have to take care of ourselves. Like the first domino I’m so curious to see if something will show up that says, “This is before that.” What can we do to create a better example of what love looks like to ourselves? Our parents, in many ways the best they could do is model their version of self-love. That was an imprint from their parents often. It also had a lot to do with the way they related. I haven’t met anybody yet that has a great example of what self-love look like. They’ve got this interesting mix of what their parents did and said as well as what they saw in society. It’s a bit jumbled up. The last example of self-love that I feel like I’ve seen is when kids are learning how to walk. You have little ones still, but not walking, just getting started walking age. What’s your youngest?
He’s turning seven in a few weeks.
It’s been a while but you remember when he was walking or learning to, and falling down and making a mess all the time. You had to cover up the sharp objects in the house, on the tables and stuff, because he’d be falling all the time. You never looked at your beautiful son and said, “He’ll never walk. Look at this idiot, he’ll never ever walk, let alone run.” On the scale of best to worst parents, even the worst of them would only look at their kid and go, “He’ll be walking soon.” No question, he’d be walking and be running. This unconditional acceptance of a child as it’s falling and falling and falling, learning to walk. There’s no judgment even from those parents that might otherwise do awful things with their kids. They never look at their kids and say, “That kid will never walk.” It defies reason. In that moment, that child understands what it feels like on an emotional level to be accepted and loved unconditionally. Then we put all these conditions around our love for ourselves and for other people.
When we talk about pivot, it’s a lot of times those conversations have to do with people’s livelihood. What are they doing for work? Is it their purpose? Is it why they were born? Does it fulfill them or not? You and I have similar stories that we’re doing things that didn’t fill us up, that didn’t fill us on the inside. Even though they were profitable and were maybe good business reasons to stay doing it, we stopped doing it because it was hurting us, hurting our heart and eroding us. The essential pivot is the pivot of how you look at yourself, regardless of the work you do and the amount of money you make. We know so many people that have lots of money and still live in scarcity, still living from that place that will never be enough to make you enough.
Or they are afraid to lose what they already have, which is still coming from scarcity. There’s never a place of fulfillment or satisfaction.
I would love to get your thoughts on distinction between scarcity and abundance. I know you teach this to a lot of people.
The most important law is the Law of Sufficiency and Abundance. It’s not just the Law of Abundance, it’s the Law of Sufficiency and Abundance. If you look at Law of Polarity on a scale and spectrum with lack being on one pole and abundance being on the other pole, the doorway into abundance is being satisfied. It’s having that satisfaction. It doesn’t mean you’re over the moon excited like, “End-all-be-all,” but you’re at least in a place of appreciation and gratitude. I know we’ve all heard that. It’s not a mind thing, it’s a feeling thing. It’s not going, “I’m grateful for those, I’m appreciative of that.” It’s really feeling. No matter if you have $5 to your name, you’ve got $5. Most people go, “I only have $5 to my name.” It’s like, “You’ve got $5. What could you do with the $5?” It’s the same condition, but it’s a very different perspective. The one will continue to constantly repeat and give back more lack and limitation. The other one opens the door for more possibilities and absolutely endless ways of creating more money. We’re not these three-dimensional things, these bio suits that walk around with their ego, we’re so much more than that. We’re multidimensional beings. We live in a multi-dimensional universe where abundance is the reality. Lack is totally man-made. Most of us have its mass consciousness and most of us are seeped in that. We all have a choice. That’s the pivot almost all day every day, the choice in, “How am I going to see this perspective? Am I going to look through the lens of black or I’m at least going to look and see what can be positive about it?”
One of the pivot story I want to share with you, I got promoted from pharmaceutical rep to a sales trainee manager when I went to Philadelphia. I landed on the East Coast and I had a boss, that we called the Eagle because he was constantly looking over everybody. He was one of sneaky guys that would come in my office and just try to see if he could find something wrong. I would have people that would tell me, “Your boss was in your office sneaking around looking through your files.” I’m like, “Look around. I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to find.” He would do that and he would try to make us do these projects, and then throw us under the bus. It was very odd. In that moment, I was like, “How can I find the positive aspects? How can I at least be satisfied with the situation?” I would look for it. On my way to work, I would think about all the reasons why I was blessed to have this particular job in this particular situation. For one, I make good money. I don’t have to work on nights and weekends so that I could do my coaching because I was building my business at the time. I was able to take weekends off and do conferences to learn more about how to build my business. There were so many different positive things that I could still look at. That’s where the opening comes from, that space of looking for what is right and good versus what’s wrong and bad. That’s where the appreciation and gratitude lives. It’s in that middle that opens that door to more abundance.
In Pivot, we talk about building a plan B. I didn’t give up practicing law for reasons that related to responsibilities, family and legit stuff like that. It gave me that idea of creating something else that was more the calling was happening simultaneously with just being appreciative that I had a vehicle that was working at the time, even though it wasn’t the vehicle for the long haul. I wasn’t going to drive that one to the finish line. That was the decision, I’m not going to be a lawyer until I’m 70 years old or whatever. It was still such a great vehicle that allowed me to travel like you, building a business that I knew nothing about, that required me to learn and invest and get more education and be mentored and guided. All of that could only happen because that first bridge, that Plan A, was still working. That’s something to be appreciative of. People, if you’ve got a job or if you’re in a business or something and it’s paying the bills, doing its job, it doesn’t mean you have to settle for that. It’s not an either/or, it’s both. Either/or is a scarcity that’s rooted in scarcity. I listen to language. I’m very acutely sensitive to that now. The word need, whenever I hear somebody say need, I see it in marketing. I see it in anything. I go, “This is all scarcity-based stuff,” because you don’t need any of it. There’s no need. What we need is we need oxygen. We need love. We need food. Very few things we need. The rest is what we want, what we think we want.
Around this time, I was getting out of my previous marriage and I had a choice. I could sit there and think, “What a jerk or he didn’t give me this,” or the woes that I would have had about this particular relationship. I chose to leave with love and I did. I chose to only feel grateful and appreciative for the time that I was in that eight-year relationship, five-year marriage, because it led me to who I was to be able to then attract Frederick into my life. Many people say, “My ex is such a this, he is such a that.” All that negativity, that’s still rooted in lack and limitation. That’s not being in that sweet spot of being in the positive aspects, being in satisfaction. I deliberately released any negativity or any resentment or any anger or any hurt that I had from leaving that relationship. Whenever I think of him, I just hold my heart because he’s such a good guy and I had eight great years with him. I’m so grateful of who I became in the process so that I was then ready for my love, Frederick. It’s that perspective, whatever I’m holding inside of myself as resentment, as anger, as anything that is pulling my energy down, if I’m going to continue, I wouldn’t have attracted Frederick. I would attract another person that would have matched the level of resentment or anger that I was at. It’s law.
Can you repeat that?
Whatever your set point, if you’re feeling anger, resentment, disappointment, whatever it is, that’s yours to own. It’s energy and you can release it. If you don’t, you’re still in that place and you will continue to attract people, situations and circumstances that bring out that feeling inside of you.
This is part of what you coach folks on, on that Law of Attraction. What it is that you truly attract into your life, which is counter-intuitive because we feel like we’re justified. There’s a lot of justification in a lot of people’s story. Classic personal development stuff where we say, “Leave your story at the door. I don’t want to hear your story,” and all that stuff, but people are involved in living their story every day, every minute of the day. They’re giving meaning to things. The meaning they give becomes at some point, the story that they’ll tell about. If the story is one of anger and resentment and other things, the universe will give you more opportunity to reaffirm your story, your meaning that you give to things. People cheat you. No problem. People cheat me all the time. I can’t make enough money, you never have enough money. I just have enough to pay my bills. Always just enough to pay the bills. I can’t get ahead, whatever it is. I’m not lucky in love. I can’t get down to the weight that I want.
It’s so sad. My parents are lovely people. My mom is 81 and my dad is 85. I called my mom up. It was 9:30 AM in Arizona, and I said, “Are you still in bed?” She was, “I know, it’s horrible. I got to get up.” I go, “Why? You’re 81, dad is 85. If you can’t sleep in and not put your alarm clock and just sleep until 11:00 for no other reason because you can, when are you going to be able to do that?” She was like, “You’re right.” She allowed herself to release the guilt. When it came to the conversation about money, I was raised with, “Other people, it must be nice to be them. Other people have the money. We don’t.” Even though my dad worked his butt off and provided a beautiful life for my mom, she’s got beautiful jewelry, she lives in a beautiful home, she drives a beautiful car, their house is paid off, they have all that they will need in their lifetime, it’s never enough.
They came to my seminar and I did this whole thing on money and how you can change your relationship with money and still the next day my mom was like, “It must be nice. I don’t have any money.” I’m like, “Oh my god.” She’s going to die with this feeling of lack for money and letting money master them instead of them being the master over money or anything else. It’s so sad. I know and I understand that that’s a much older generation. They didn’t have personal development and they didn’t change their stories and they don’t do the things that we get to do when we hear ourselves saying something that doesn’t feel good. That comes from limitation or scarcity in any way, to be able to have that mindset and then change the perspective. They were raised like that. I get that, but it just makes me so sad when I even hear 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds that they have their whole life ahead of them focused on what’s wrong, what’s lacking, what’s not enough and living in their stories. “Money is hard to come by, I can’t ever get ahead. There are not enough jobs out there.” That’s going to be your reality if you believe that. We create from our beliefs.
[Tweet “We create from our beliefs.”]
Time for a pivot. Will you share a little bit about one of your pivot journeys with us?
I will. I started talking about my boss, Dan, The Eagle, and there was a whole harassment. There were three other people that had harassment suits with him at the company. The head of marketing came to me and said, “I understand that you’re Dan’s next victim. I’d like to give you a position in marketing.” She is going to pay me more money. I’d be totally away from him. At this time, I met Frederick and he lived in Montreal. I was living in Philadelphia. I also knew what it felt like to coach someone and to have them change their life. That was what I wanted to do. At the time, I didn’t know. I was making money off of it, but there was no way I could earn a living like I did or at least I thought with my job. She offered me this position and I had to take a step back and ask myself, “If I do this, if I take this marketing position, I won’t be able to move to Montreal. I won’t be able to start my own business. I won’t be able to follow what my heart is wanting to go.” I turned her down. I made the choice to move to Montreal, to the city where, when I got here it was 70 below zero. There were snowbanks that were higher than the cars next to me. I couldn’t even see the cars. It’s French language, they have money that’s loonie and toonies. Everything was different. Everything was in French, in kilometers instead of miles and Centigrade instead of Fahrenheit, everything was different. For me, I used Dan as the fuel for my fire. I didn’t use him to beat me down. I used him as fire to get me out.
I turned down the marketing position because I wanted to follow my heart. I knew that if I could create abundance at a job, my job is not the source of my financial freedom. It’s not the source of my money. It’s not the source of my abundance. Me, the multi-dimensional being, the one that breathes me, is the source of my abundance. If I could create it there in a job, I could create it over here in my own business. Within less than a year of leaving corporate America and going on my own, I was making as much, if not more, because I truly believed that me, the bigger me, creates my abundance, not my job. If we look at the job or the circumstance that we are in as the only way, we’re so limiting. Why would you want to limit the divine?
Not if you had an understanding of the divine.
That old perspective about 600 years ago where everybody thought the world was flat until it was discovered that the world was actually round and what that did to travel and the possibilities. I bet back in the day people were like, “Nope. The world is flat.” They wanted to argue for their limitations. “Nope, there’s no way it’s round. I bet.” There are three things that we still do that need to shift our perspectives from being flat to around the world. One of them is knowing yourself as a multi-dimensional being instead of just what you see, feel, touch, taste and smell. There’s much more going on here. We’re 4 % of what’s going on here. The other 96 % is all on physical. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is we think that something outside of us has superpowers and that we’re victims to whatever circumstances happen. We all have superpowers because we all can choose our thoughts. We all can choose our emotions. We all choose our perspectives. We all choose the energy that we want to give out. That’s a superpower. We get to deliberately choose and design our lives. Each one of us has it, everyone. It’s not something outside of us that only one person has it or one thing or entity. We all have it. We’re all breathing it every day. We have to shift our mindset from lack and limitations to abundance and prosperity because that’s the truth. When you start looking for things to be grateful for, when you start looking for evidence of abundance in your life, you start seeing more evidence of abundance in your life. I’ve been in both places. The old saying, “I’ve been rich, I’ve been poor,” I’ve been in lack and that is the worst, horrible place to be. I’ve been in abundance and whenever stuff comes up and it’s not in alignment with that, it’s painful.
My husband and I have always had a deal ever since we had kids, Sunday is his day to go golf in the morning, and I go and get massages every Saturday. That’s our deal. It gives him alone time with the kids, I get alone time with the kids. I don’t have to be a mom. I don’t have to be a wife. I don’t have to be a business owner. I get to be Christy just getting a nice massage. One Saturday, I’m lying there getting my amazing massage and all of a sudden, I started feeling anxious, like freaking out anxious while I’m on the table getting a massage. Now, knowing what I know and all the work that I’ve done to myself, I know that I need to follow that energy, because everything’s energy. I started asking myself, “What’s the anxiety about?” This overwhelming fear came up.
The Course of Miracles talks about these two primary emotions; fear and love. Let’s go deeper because under fear is always lack, always. Lack is the cause and root of negative emotion, including fear. I said, “There’s fear there, but what’s the fear? What’s the lack? What black thoughts am I thinking that is creating this feeling of fear?” I heard inside and you all might think I’m crazy, but I heard a voice saying, “You’ve used it all up.” I got curious and I said, “I’ve used all of what up?” “Success. You’ve used up all of your success. There’s not more success for you.” I went, “Interesting.” I started talking to that voice. I’m like, “There isn’t some pie with a limited amount where I’ve used it all up. I have a bakery. I can make as many pies as I want to make. This is an abundant universe.” I started feeling within myself, it was in my solar plexus, where this very old part of me, this very old thought, was coming up saying, “I’m done. I’ve used it all up.” I was able to bring in that energy of abundance and completely pivot my energetic field into a space of abundance and feel that feeling of abundance. That feeling of lack went away, that thought has never come back and it’s completely totally different in the trajectory in that. If I would have numbed it or ignored it, I might all of a sudden find myself sabotaging any success that I have because I think that I’ve used it all up.
You were getting a message. There was a messenger. You could have sent the messenger away. You could have shot the messenger, numb the messenger, control the messenger. All those things we do from time to time. Then the messenger would have gone away because you would have succeeded, as we all do. Except the messenger doesn’t go away forever, and that’s where the sabotage comes from because then the messenger comes back to get your attention again. “Are you going to pay attention this time?”
This time, it’s manifested. It might be a feeling. The next time it might be something that manifests so that I have to physically look at it.
Do you believe or do you know whether that chain of events began with a feeling or began with a thought?
I truly believe that they are so connected together, a thought becomes a feeling and a feeling becomes a thought. It is so interchangeable. Truthfully, it started with the belief. There was some belief there in lack that created the thought that then created the feeling, and then the feeling created the thought and then it gets bigger.
This is just exploration. I’m just curious because for a long time, what I taught was, because it was what was taught to me, thoughts create feelings and feelings create the next thing that turns into outcomes. Over the last year, my own journey has got me feeling and knowing that it’s the feeling that comes first. The feeling is rooted in something from the past, whether it’s our emotional past which is usually emotional development and experiences or it’s something that precedes that. Ultimately, it’s a feeling that then triggers a way of interpreting the feeling. I’m not making an argument, I’m just curious about this. I’m not 1,000% sure but you get a stomach feeling and it could be my stomach is empty, which then triggers you to think which is you’re hungry. We know that that’s not necessarily a sign of hunger. It could be even dehydration oftentimes. It could be that you’re thirsty, not that you’re hungry. The feeling inside goes, “I must be hungry.” It is incredible because where do we deal with this stuff at the root cause? That’s my reason for being curious. I want to get at the root. What’s the cause?
It’s all energy. We pay more attention to how we feel and what we think. At least for me, being on that table, there was no denying the anxiety I was feeling. I probably was having some thoughts somewhere about it. It didn’t even get me to pay attention. It was that feeling place of just, “I feel bad.” That’s not the house I play in anymore. It used to be. I’ve moved out of that neighborhood. When I’d feel bad and I’m feeling that anxiety, I have to stop and pay attention because something is going on. All emotions are trying to inform us in some way.
To get our attention. Ultimately, this is back to that beginning place of when do you get attention? We’re seeking it because it’s a signal that we’re loved. Somehow the attention equals love. Something’s vying, trying to get your attention, “Pay attention to me.” It’s really fascinating. What a pivot, a great way to reframe. There are lots of ways to describe how it is that we handle and how we make decisions. I wanted to tell you something because you and I are so connected on so many different levels. I have this beautiful book.
A Course in Miracles, The New Beginning, Chapter 30, page 625 where it’s Rules for Decision, because it’s so much of what you’re talking about is about how do you make decisions all the time? We make them unconsciously. How are you making those decisions? How are you making those choices? Are you making those choices, those decisions with fear or with love? With God or with some other thing that you might call the enemy or whatever you might call that, with abundance? Are you making that decision, that choice from a place of abundance or are you making that decision from a place of scarcity? That’s truly empowering to know that we get to make that decision ourselves in every moment. Someone that has a lot of money but still feels lack is living in scarcity despite their bank account. Someone that has very little in their bank account, for example, would be okay to have more but for whatever reason they have little, but is living with gratitude and appreciation. They are abundant in that moment. They are deciding from a place and making choices from a place of appreciation, gratitude and love.
For me, it’s all about the essence that we choose to be in every moment. I can just ask everybody to just wrap into a moment when you felt joyful. You felt this bubbled up joy, you felt giddy, something happened and you’re just remembering it. You don’t even have to remember something, just getting into that field of joy. We live in a holographic universe and anything that’s ever been felt, we can tap into and feel. In this moment, if you are intending to put your attention on that feeling of joy, your cells start to resonate with that sensation of joy and nothing had to change in your outer reality. I didn’t give you a million dollars, I didn’t say you’re going to go on this amazing trip, I didn’t say, “You’re going to get this promotion or, here’s the love of your life,” nothing out here changed. Inside of you, in a split-second, just within even sixteen seconds, eighteen seconds, you could start to feel yourself expanding instead of contracting. That’s the key. We always have that choice. No matter what our conditions are, we get to feel the way we want to feel. We get that free will, we have that free choice. When you do that, that’s what changes all our outer circumstances and conditions anyway.
That’s why I feel that the first domino is the feeling, for that exact reason. We can do that so much more naturally than trying to get control of our crazed head. This thing is a lunatic at times no matter how much work you’ve done on yourself. Is it just me Christy or you buy in to?
I agree. The exciting thing in what you’re saying too is that from a vibrational perspective, our emotions have much stronger vibration than the thoughts that we think. Just by tuning in and changing, by tapping into with your intention to feel abundance. Even if you don’t physically know what that feels like, there’s a part of you inside of you, the one that breathes you, is always connected to that abundance. Just with your intention to connect with that feeling of abundance, that’s a much stronger vibration than even just thinking thoughts of abundance. It’s about feeling. The strongest vibration that we have is our feeling sense. It’s our guidance system. It’s our teacher. It’s our informant.
Is there a ritual or practice that you get engaged in everyday that keep you in that place of centeredness or appreciation?
Yes. I meditate pretty much every day. The days that I don’t, I can tell that I haven’t meditated. It’s like such a calm and zero level of place that I need to start with just even be able to deliberately design the day that I want. I take time throughout the day to just take a couple minutes to breathe and choose, “How am I feeling right now? Let me amp up my energy.” Mind for me is all about freedom. When I have that feeling and that sense of freedom, that’s it for me. Freedom is just it for me. If I can just take a minute to connect with that feeling of freedom, that’s it for me. Abundance is awesome, success is awesome, joy is awesome, all that appreciation and gratitude, all of that, it just even expands beyond that. Freedom is where I need to live and that’s my home. I definitely deliberately connect with that sense of freedom each and every day.
Here’s one thing from that section of A Course in Miracles, “Today, I will make no decisions by myself.” Who do we make our decisions with? What do we make our decisions with? To feel how it is you want to feel, to create the day you want to create. You engineer it. I don’t know whether it’s reverse engineering or it’s something other than that, but you engineer it. It’s a different way to go about living then by default, where the day shows up in the old way or it shows up based on a lot of habitual thinking. This is the part that’s odd too, that thinking isn’t ours necessarily. It’s partly ours, but it’s a lot of what we’ve seen and we’ve been programmed to believe. Beliefs, where do those beliefs come from, we’re not born with them. They show up because of our good, well-intentioned parents, other sources, spiritual leaders, media, wherever. That’s impacted and affected us and in many ways, infected our thinking. Our feeling, our sensing, is innate. This is where we’re at the most natural and not very different to our ancestors of hundreds or thousands of years ago even, that feeling, that sensing self. Thank you for sharing your pivot story, especially how it was that you tracked, where you went to track the source of the feeling. That will be helpful for people. When anxiety comes up, when worry or anger or whatever these things that come up as feelings, they show up in the head but then you can track them and go, “Where actually do I sense that in my body? Where do I feel that? Is there a feeling that I can attach it to and explore and be curious about that?” As opposed to trying to necessarily figure out your head which only makes you dizzier at the time when you do that. Christy, what a joy, a blessing. I would do this to spend time with you. It‘s so worth it.
[Tweet “We’re not born with beliefs. They show up because of our good, well-intentioned parents.”]
I love you so much. I am looking forward to seeing you soon.
Christy, what’s a great way for people to come and check you out, website or something where people could find you?
They can go to ChristyWhitman.com. As a matter of fact, I have seven days of meditations to help you realize and know that you and your life are unlimited. Seven days in a row, different subjects on meditation that I guide you through to help you just expand.
We look forward to the next conversation and to engaging with you. A few ways for you to engage with us, if you haven’t yet subscribed to the podcast, do that. You can go to Start My PIVOT Community on Facebook. I will remind you of something that I remind myself of every morning when I wake up. It’s my morning ritual. The first thing we want to do in the morning is wake up. What a joy, what a blessing to wake up, to be able to be guided to our assignment for the day. Knowing in that moment that we do wake up physically and metaphorically, that we are more conscious tomorrow and every day than the day before, it’s a fact, not a guess. It’s a fact that as you’re waking up taking your first deep, beautiful morning breath, that people will be taking their last. Wake up, be in gratitude, even for a moment to sit in appreciation for the fact that you’ve been given another day, a holy sacred day, to do what with? You get to decide. Lastly, stand up. What a blessing that is and either throw your arms up in the air, put hand on your chest, whatever you wanted to do, but say out loud, “I love my life. I love my life. I love my life.” We love you all and we’ll see you very soon. Ciao for now.
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