THE HOLISTIC LAWYER

Do you remember the book, Winning Through Intimidation, by Robert J. Ringer? It was a business strategy book about how to outsmart your business opponents.

While intimidation surely has its place in our physical world, here’s a strategy that is even more powerful: Winning through appreciation!

Winning through appreciation is a powerful approach to life I learned from a book that once sat, unread, in my bookcase for almost five years. Back then, I was teaching a Love Yourself, Heal Your Life class at Renaissance Unity Church. One of my students, a dear man who always used to help me set things up, gave me the book as a gift to thank me for teaching the class. (Thank you, David.)

The title sounds silly, Sara and the Foreverness of Friends of a Feather by Jerry and Esther Hicks and I thought it was a children’s book. So it sat on my shelf until recently, when for some reason it caught my eye and I picked it up. It was captivating.

Those of you who are Jerry and Esther Hicks’ fans know that their books channel the teachings of Abraham, a group of spirit beings whose central teaching seems to be that we each vibrate at different levels, much like a radio transmitting system and “tune in” or receive based on the frequency we send out.

The Sara book brings this philosophy to life through the eyes of a little girl who initially finds the world a mean and lonely place. She finds a true friend in an owl named Solomon, who teaches her important lessons she never learned in school.

One lesson that Sara learns from Solomon is this: We are all hooked up to the flow of Well Being at all times. We don’t even have to try. But just as a faucet has a valve that either opens to release water or closes to shut it off, we shut off the valve to our natural state of Well Being whenever we focus on negative conditions around us. And then we join what Solomon calls the Chain of Pain.

It’s all about our vibrational energy, for in truth everything is energy in one form or another. When we focus on the bad or negative things we do not correct them, but instead attract more of it. And then we confirm our belief that life is full of problems.

When we focus instead on the things that make us feel good, we align with that positive energy and attract more of that. It sounds so simple and it is, but not always easy. We are trained to look at negative conditions and react to them, instead of focusing on feeling good. If we focus on dramas and disasters, that is exactly what we will get. We are shutting off the valve to our Well Being.

But how can we open our valve? What can we do when we experience meanness from others or witness cruelty? Answer: Practice appreciation.

We can’t change anyone else, but we can change what we focus on. Practicing appreciation is the quickest, fastest way to move from feeling bad to feeling good in an instant, no matter what situation we are in.

It doesn’t matter what we appreciate, it only matter that we do. We can appreciate the miracle of electricity and enjoy the pleasure of being in a warm, well-lighted room. We can appreciate the paved roads that make it easy for us to drive from place to place. We can appreciate how clean the office is when we come in to work each morning. We can appreciate the sunrise, a smile from a stranger or the softness of a kitten’s fur.

Once we start looking for things to appreciate, we get into the good feeling place and just naturally attract more good feelings. Soon we find that nothing outside us can stop us. We can keep our valve open to attract more and more good into our lives.

We also find that other people’s “wrongdoing” is not as upsetting as it was before. After all, it’s just a matter of perspective. We all mean well, we just have very different ways of expressing it.

If you don’t buy into someone else’s Chain of Pain, then no one can ruin your day. Do you ever have those times during the day when you start to worry about something you did or didn’t do, then begin to imagine all the terrible repercussions that may result? I think we all have.

What I have begun to do when this happens, is to start appreciating whatever I can. It doesn’t have to be related to what you are obsessing about. The point is just to get to the good feeling place. And soon you find that your terrors aren’t so terrible anymore. The boogeyman we had imagined turns out not to exist. What a relief.

Perhaps this strategy seems a bit too simple. The most profound and effective solutions in life are always the simple ones. I am a simple, straightforward person and I always look for the shortest route to get from where I am to where I want to go. Appreciation takes you out of the Chain of Pain into the Chain of Joy.

Don’t analyze it, critique it or try to understand it. Just do it, the next time you feel unhappiness (a sure sign that your valve is closed) and then test your results. As any business strategist will tell you, results are what matter. Appreciation works. Let it work for you.

© 2006 Mindy L. Hitchcock

Mindy L. Hitchcock is a family law attorney with 20 years experience, collaborative law, president International Alliance of Holistic Lawyers, member of the Collaborative Law Institute of Michigan and Human Rights Campaign.
mlhitchcock@lady4justice.com, www.lady4justice.com and Access Power Center, www.mindyhitchcock.com.