insights: living in siberia

When things started going terribly wrong last year I was kidnapped to Siberia. Actually it was me. I bought a one way ticket to a self-imposed exile to the great white solitary North.

It was as though I wore an ankle cuff tied to to a table in a cold dark room and no one knew where I was. Days turned into night turned into day turned into weeks turned into months. I cut myself off from everyone and didn't even try to lick my wounds. I let them fester until I was one walking wounded girl. Actually I wasn't even walking. I had given up my morning workouts. I had given up caring about everything when it seemed that everything that I cared about was slowly being taken away from me.

And one day I was in Top Foods surely buying more junk food when I stopped into Barnes & Noble and found myself in the self-help section where I randomly picked up a book "The Game of Life and How to Play It" by Florence Scovel Shinn. I took that and my potato chips home with me.

That night I started reading and I didn't stop until the book was finished and dog-eared and highlighted. This was the book that started letting hope back into my life. Remember "The Secret"? Great book. This book expounds on that but what it so incredible is that it was written by Scovel Shinn in 1925!

"The Game of Life and How to Play It" is about  'discovering the astonishing power of your mind  to create success.'

What you think, you are.

Some lines from the book that mad a difference:

• Desire is tremendous force, and must be directed in the right channels, or chaos ensues. (p. 41)
• How long must you remain in the dark? Until one can see in the dark. cast you burden (forgive) and you will see in the dark. (p. 51)
• It takes a very strong mind to neutralize a prophecy of evil. The student should declare "Every false prophecy shall come to naught; every plan my Father in heaven has not planned shall be dissolved and dissipated. The divine idea shall now come to pass. However, if any good message has ever been given one, of coming happiness or wealth, harbor and expect it, and it will manifest sooner or later, through the law of expectancy. (p. 72)
• affirmation for health "Divine Love floods my consciousness with health, and every cell in my body is filled with light."  (p. 95)

Reading this book actually shocked me back. It made me realize that there is light outside of my exiled room but ONLY if I imagined that light. I had to BELIEVE the light was there. It blew my mind that in 1925 Florence Scovel Shinn was teaching the law of attraction. Every chapter of her powerful book reinforces that what you think, you will become. What you focus on, will happen. I suddenly realized that everything was going to hell because that is what I expected to happen. Once I lost the baby, then my job, I EXPECTED everything to go wrong and it DID! I had to stop focusing on what was wrong in my life and how awful things were and focus on what was right like my husband and our dog and our home and our family and our friends. . .I had to give thanks instead of bitch every day and cry about what I had lost.

I read "The Game of Life" as if it held the instructions on how to survive, how to take that first tentative step towards the door of my 'cell' and into the light. I still read this book every night. I open it randomly and read a page or two to remind myself that life is good. It is full of light if you know where to look.

Armed with this book, I bought another one way ticket. This time I left cold Siberia for the sun, for the light, for my life.