What You See Is What You Get

”Mirror, mirror on the wall… who’s the fairest of them all?”.

My relationship to Rishikesh and to the path of yoga is a love-story. Not only because romantic love has been a big part of my life here, but because of my relationship to the town and the path itself. Some weeks I see magic everywhere; in the smiles of shopkeepers, the ”namaste’s” from strangers, the warm wind or the glowing stars at night… Sometimes it seems as if every tree has sprung from the divine power of Shiva. The very ground beneath my feet feels alive and vibrant, the air dense with scents of spices, cigarettes and food being prepared… Other weeks, Rishikesh seems almost dead to me. The babas are more bhogis than yogis, the trees and rocks are silent and the dirt and poverty seems to stand out more than anything else. Suddenly everyone is rude, impolite, inconsiderate, selfish, ignorant… Rishikesh is always reflecting how I feel inside, just like all places and people do.

The world, our experience of physical reality, is a hall of mirrors and what we are inside we see outside. This used to be yogic philosophy for me, but now it is reality through experience. People I meet are just reflections of different aspects of my own self. Aspects that I either suppress and secretly wish I could live out or that I am proud of and want to enhance. When we feel magic and love inside, our outer experience becomes magical and loving. Heaven on Earth springs from within us.

When we have fear and anger, then the world seems unjust and violent. When we are the first to smile, then the world smiles back creating a domino effect, making one person after the other down the street to smile towards you.

Opposed to what is commonly believed, the law of attraction is not that opposites attract, except perhaps romantically. Instead the law of attraction brings that which is alike together. We see this when we have a bad day and as the day progresses, one thing after the other goes wrong and we feel as if we’ve almost been cursed with bad luck. Because our focus is on what goes wrong, thereby attracting it. The good news is that by understanding this, we can deliberately choose what kind of day we want. What kind of life we want. I’m working increasingly with life coaching these days, which has become a passion of mine and as I see the immediate effect in my own life, the desire to help others come to that point of personal power and contentment grows.

As I’ve written again and again in previous blogs; we are born creators and desires make up life. This is not some religious thought, but an understanding of how the mind and the brain actually works and how we process data. I am profoundly surprised by how many spiritual people are willing to remain completely ignorant on how the brain works. ”Meditation”, ”Enlightenment”, ”Shut up, it’s worked for 5000 years!”… but they have no clue what is happening inside the brain and how we can use it so that we don’t have to spend  an eternity in a moist cave to get reconnected with our divine power.

As the world is made up of mirrors, we can choose what we see and thereby what we attract. A personal practice of mine, which I’ve only practiced for some weeks but seen amazing results by, is the practice of deliberate intent. It is very simple and very effective… actually, it may seem too simple as we’ve been told that magic is very advanced. The good news is that it’s not!

Every night before sleep I do yoga nidra and in the deep state of relaxation I plant the affirmations for my life to blossom in the direction I desire. As I wake up each morning, I linger in bed for a while and while being totally relaxed I set a deliberate intent for the day regarding what I want to see. ”I see love around me. I see kindness around me. I see magic around me. I see generosity around me. I see prosperity around me…”.

After a few days of practice and because of nothing mysterious but the amazing function of the human brain, this is what you will begin to see everywhere. And what you put your attention to, by the law of what is alike attracts each other, this is what you will begin to see in the mirrors around you.

Jenny Wickman
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