I was driving to work on Tuesday morning and my iPod was set on “shuffle” for my long commute.  The AUX jack in my car is very tempermental but that day it worked like a charm so I could hear the music through my car’s sound system.  A tune popped up that I hadn’t heard in forever and made me so happy that I started singing at the top of my lungs.  In fact, I was more than happy — I was absolutely ecstatic and I didn’t care who knew it.  As the song started nearing the end, I actually said out loud, “Gee, I really wish that I could hear that again” but I couldn’t mess with my iPod while I was driving.  Don’t you know that song repeated not once but for the rest of my commute?!  The moment of silence before the opening riff was filled with expectation time and again: would it play Scissor Sisters or would my iPod resume its shuffling?  And every time the song restarted I laughed my ass off and started singing.  I now know every word of this song perfectly — and if I don’t hear it again for quite a while that would be fine!  8)

When I got to work, I signed into SurveyMonkey to explore options for distributing course evaluation summary reports to our faculty.  I found a way to generate summary reports as PDF files automatically but it wouldn’t include the narrative comments that students made — only the quantitative results.  I asked my evaluator to contact the company to request that they integrate quantitative and qualitative results into the PDFs because I really, REALLY wanted this functionality.  She looked at me like I was nuts.  In fact, as I spoke with her about this, I could feel the tremendous relief that would result from this time-saving feature — it was as if I already had what I wanted and it felt great.  The next morning, as soon as I walked in the door, the evaluator said (I’m paraphrasing), “You’re not going to believe this but I signed into SurveyMonkey to contact them about what you want and they added it yesterday!  You should have wished for something really big!”

Well, I wished for two things that day and got them both.  Why?  The primary reason is because I felt rather than thought.  Pure positive emotion is a powerful manifesting tool and when you frame your desires such that they contain 100% of what you want and nothing of their opposite then nothing stands in the way of you getting what you want.  For example, I wanted only to hear that song again so that I could keep the fun going — I didn’t think to myself, “oh, but that’s highly unlikely given the fact that my iPod is on shuffle and I could play it for over a week nonstop and never hear the same song twice.”  If my desire had also contained its opposite then my iPod would have shuffled as usual and I wouldn’t have heard that song again.  Another reason that I got what I wanted and I got it immediately is because my desires were pretty low-stakes — if the song had not repeated then my world would not have come crumbling down around me.  But this was an important lesson for me: no matter how high or low the stakes may be, the process is exactly the same: if I get out of my own way and just revel in the pure positive emotion that comes from getting what I want, whether or not I have it yet, then what I want will come and it will do so quickly.

I invite you to play with this in your daily lives — start small until you feel like you can wish big without any qualifiers — and post your results as a comment below.  Make your life, as you really want it to be, the gift that you give yourself this holiday season.