By Lydia Wilson
For The Bali Times

KEROBOKAN ~ I was at one of my nieces’ wedding party 10 years ago when I met one of my brother-in-laws whom I hadn’t seen for quite a few years. The moment we greeted each other he straight away said to me: “You are a very lucky person!” Without thinking, I agreed and thanked him.

But then I asked why he’d said that, and he said he had been observing what had been going on in my life and it seemed to him that I always got what I wanted.

I’d never thought about it before but his comment made me start to think and it dawned on me that, yes, he was right. Although not always, but I did notice that I often do get what I really wish for, and I feel lucky and blessed because of it.

When I went home that night, I thought about his comment again and I started to remember the many times I really did wish for something and like miracles my wishes were granted.

The one I remember most was when I was a poor student living alone in London back in 1975. Coming from a tropical country, I found the climate there was terribly cold and damp for me. I had only enough money to buy myself a cheap, thin woollen coat to keep me warm over the winter, which of course didn’t keep me warm at all. Every time I went out I could feel the cold right in my bones. My body would be shivering, my teeth continuously chattering.

In those days, nobody minded people wearing fur coats and I really wished I could have owned one to keep out the cold. But it was impossible as it would have cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds to buy one and I didn’t have the money.

Then one day a miracle happened. I was passing an Oxfam shop in Camden when I saw an old lady hanging a beautiful, full-length, brown fur coat in the shop window. I asked her how much it was and the sweet old lady told me it was a beaver lamb coat and was only £10. I had £15 in my handbag that day but it was enough to buy the coat, with some money left to get home. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I told the lady I would wear the coat straight away because I was freezing, and she told me I was very lucky because someone had donated the coat just that morning.

The coat must have been looked after well because it was as good as new and it kept me comfortably warm for the five years I was living in the UK. I donated it to an Oxfam shop when I left the country to go back to Indonesia.

I used to wonder why some people are so lucky and others not. It seems that life can be unfair to some but not to others. Through my own experiences and the experiences of clients who have come to see me for prosperity issues, I have since realized that it’s nothing to do with luck: all of us are capable of manifesting what we wish for. It’s about how much faith we have in ourselves to manifest what we wish to have.

Without realizing it, a lot of us are unconsciously blocking the flow of the abundance of prosperity into our lives. Here are some of the blocks that may prevent us from achieving prosperity:

Our doubts – We wish for something but we don’t believe that it is possible so we give up.

We don’t know what we want – If we can’t imagine what we wish to have, we cannot manifest it. To build a house, an architect needs to have a blueprint of what the house would look like or be like. Without a clear picture in our mind of what we wish to have, we can’t manifest what we want either.

I have realized that since I was a child, this is what I have been doing every time I wished for something. I have unknowingly created the “miracles” that have been happening in my life by having a clear picture in my mind of what I wanted. I remember repeatedly imagining myself wearing a full-length fur coat and felt how wonderful and warm it was to wear. I used to imagine it as if I already had it and I didn’t realize then that by repeatedly doing that, I changed my doubts into faith and once my subconscious had this faith, sooner or later it helped me to manifest it. It was roughly about two weeks later that I found the fur coat at the Oxfam shop.

We focus our mind on what we don’t want – We will also manifest what we do not want if we let our mind focus on it. The stronger the feeling that comes with the imagination, the faster it will materialize. I had a client who had often worried about how he was going to pay his monthly rent and bills, and in his mind he could clearly see the bill collectors banging at his door every month and he felt panic at not having the money to pay them. This fearful image had driven him to gambling his money in jackpot machines, hoping to win so that he could pay his bills, which of course made it worse and surely enough he started to have gambling problems and had no money to pay his bills.

Our hidden anxieties and fears – Although we wish for something good to happen to us but deep down within our subconscious we fear the risk, then nothing will happen. For example: We would like to be rich but fear that if we were, our friends would be jealous or people would harm us, such as by stealing from us or kidnapping our children.

Our negative imprints – For example: If we have been preconditioned that money is the root of all evil and we feel or judge people who have a lot of money as evil, greedy people. As we don’t want to be greedy or evil, we block the flow of prosperity from coming into our lives.

Yet we sometimes don’t realize the difference that, yes, there are some people who have a lot of money who are greedy and a slave to their money, but there are also a lot of rich people who are actually a master of their money. They are the people who know that money is just a tool for them to use for all the good things it can bring.

Money is neither good nor bad. Money is just something that we use to get what we need in life. In the days before money was invented, people used to barter with the goods they produced. But as society grew and people had many different kinds of needs, so money was invented as a means of exchange.

It is how we use it that makes money good or bad. There are millions of good things we can do with money. We can help the poor by providing shelters or jobs for them; we can help sick people who can’t afford to pay for healthcare; we can provide better education and safer homes for the orphans and street children; and we can also take better care of ourselves and our children.

I will continue with this theme next week. Till then, love and light.

Lydia Wilson is a transpersonal hypnotherapist and trainer based in Kerobokan, Bali. If you have a question you would like answered in this column, write to Lydia at bluelight7@gmail.com. For more go to www.bluelight7.com.