Experience Your Good Now! Louise Hay & Puerto Rico

"I want beef jerky," I leaned in to tell my husband, one row in front of me.
"They didn't say anything about beef jerky," he tells me. Here we are, mid-air on the way home, and I'm staring at Sky Magazine, pg. 154. "It shows a picture here..."

"Don't get your hopes up," he tells me. But that's been my problem all along.

Reading Louise Hay's new book, Experience Your Good Now, Learning to Use Affirmations,
has probably been the hardest to read yet. I'd been ill- physically ill. How I felt was not in line with uttering things like, "I am grateful for my perfect health. " Nor could I imagine feeling any other way, or being any other way. My recent mantra's ran more along the lines of, "Well, Hey, at least I'm alive!"

And it's not that I don't understand the concept of affirmations, or even that I doubt their effectiveness. It's that without the Belief to back them up, I could only cynically utter one. My mentality was one of deprivation disguised as practicality. 'I couldn't do this because I couldn't afford it.' or 'There are too many more qualified writers with actual educations.' I'd allowed not going to college to become my fall-back excuse for anything that I wanted to do but didn't. That excuse turned easily in my mind to 'I'm not smart enough.' Like Anthony Bourdain taking his maiden trip to the Greek Isles, I held the small shiny book in my hands with one thought- I'll try.

On page 30, Louise Hay writes,

As I've said many times, I belive that should is one of the most damaging words in our language. Every time we use it, we are, in effect, saying that we are wrong, or we were wrong, or we're going to be wrong. I would like to take the word should out of our vocabulary forever, and replace it with the word could. This word gives us a choice, and then we're never wrong.

Think of five things that you "should" do. Then replace should with could.

Louise's book also coincided with something odd that happened.
I got an email that quoted an outrageous price on Roundtrip airfare to Puerto Rico ($191!). I joked to Steven, and he quipped back, "Book it!" Ha ha, very funny. We had just gone to Barbados four months prior, our first vacation in 14 years. Though we'd always talked about seeing the world, it was always tacked on before or after 'One Day.' I'd been maids at hotels, and comfortable with that.
I was the one that cleaned to rooms, never the one who stayed in them.
What made me think any differently?

& then,

but Why not me?

& then,

we randomly reached into the magicians hat, and pulled out exactly what we wanted.

A little more of the World.

Puerto Rico? We jumped into a spontanaeous moment of being the little engine that could.

Oddly, there had never been any Puerto Rico discussion. Not in passing, not ever. We didn't even really know where it was.
In our little three day trip, kids in tow, We found that wherever you go, you can find a little piece of brilliance. We slept at The Gallery Inn, surrounded by Vintage charm, and heads...Concrete heads. Lots of them. We hiked a rainforest, got plopped down into a Bioluminescent Bay, Flew kites in front of El Morro, got stuck in an out of gas bus on a San Juan highway. We drank cold coconut water out of beheaded green nuts, and we filled our happy bladders full. Pigeons alit on our shoulders gracing us with their happy birdie vibrations- (birdie everything- as well as a need to shower).

We discovered that Puerto Rican coffee is without a doubt, the very best coffee on the planet- the closest adjective to even try to describe this stuff? It's alien coffee. It's just not from this Earth.

During the course of our little trip,

my little book tagged along,

the yellow letters glaring at me. Experience Your Good Now!

I was- and oddly, the 'Shift' (Yep, a W. Dyer reference) may well have occured without me even noticing.

My thoughts on others and my station (ha!) in life were sinking me. Only those other folks flew around on random vacations...I was the maid. I never minded that position- but it was where I stood. I took jobs that were somehow beneath others in my mind. But I liked those jobs. Perhaps the people I imagined that were better than me hated their jobs. (& why was it even necessary to imagine that they did?) Sometimes I'd swing in fast, my cart wheels spinning gravel, to bring a cooler of ice somewhere, and I liked it. I liked wind in my hair, the sight of golfers playing and waving as they went past, sitting in the restaurant kitchen with other housekeepers, after mopping the bathrooms, eating $10 slices of pie for free (because if they cut it they could not serve it the next day...) Maybe I applied at those jobs because I felt like I was less, but I can see now it was all pretty rediculous. You can mentally allow yourself to be less, but you can also just accept yourself as you are.

You can believe what you like & the world will morph around you accordingly.

Louise Hay- pg 103- Cursing is an affirmation, worrying is an affirmation, and hatred is an affirmation. All of these are attracting to you that which you're affirming. Love, appreciation, gratitude, and compliments are also affirmations and will similarly attract that which you are affirming.

Nelson Mandela said, "In order to build our Nation, we must first exceed our own expectations." (This one popped in front of my eyes during the in flight movie, Invictus. Oddly appropriate).

Not allowing yourself to be good enough is an affirmation.

Not getting your hopes up is an affirmation.

I unknowingly had already been using affirmations, but because I wasn't saying aloud something that was in a written statement form, I just wasn't aware. And I can see that repeating a positive statement could affect your energy and alter your belief in time. Am I ready for that? I don't know. At this time, let me just use this one .. "Why Not?"

I laughed with my oldest daughter, seated by the window.

"We need to make this a group effort," I tell her. "We need to collectively see the jerky." "Yes, I see it." We sat laughing at the idea of manifesting elusive jerky on a plane, let alone being on the plane.

I can tell you that we did indeed have jerky. & We will always have Puerto Rico.