There is great power in attention. What you pay attention to, consistently and over time, must respond. It has no choice. If you focus with belief in yourself and your ability to effect change, it must eventually give way to your attention. If you focus with personal power, building your center of truth inside, and acting out of that feeling of rightness and peace that is your center, receiving and acting upon guidance from your heart of rightness, it cannot help but begin to transform.

You may focus on an area of self-discipline. You may focus on outward events and people as well, but always from the point of view of what actions you might take and what attitudes you might shift internally, not in trying to force or control change in others. If you focus on a relationship with this in mind, that your goal is to connect more deeply, to understand the other person, and to shift your own responses and attitudes, you cannot help but succeed.

If you pay attention to an issue in your life such as weight or finances, give it your fullest attention and priority, being willing to see it through the obstacles that arise and the slips and slides along the way, if you keep your attention focused and your heart open and wiling to change as you go along, you cannot help but effect change. Change may be slow, but it is change nonetheless.

After all, you are the object of the change, and it is your attention that is focused. Begin with belief, belief that you can accomplish this change within yourself, regardless of the past. Know and accept that there will be challenges, challenges during which you will prove deep love for yourself by continuing with what you wish to accomplish, this great gift you wish to give yourself. Know that it may take years, but that you are worth years of focus and attention. Know, also, that every time you face the challenge and go forward, every time you fill yourself with courage instead of discouragement, that the angels surround you and applaud, lending you their support and working to make the world around you a bit brighter in response to your considerable courage.

This is your life. Focus on it. Give it the attention it is due. Fill yourself with power and make your life your own.

Here is a little affirmation for today:

I am my own best friend. I love myself completely and absolutely, exactly as I am. Everything has led to the moment, and this moment is perfect as it unfolds around me, through me, in me.

I am worthy of my own efforts, my own attention, my own focus. I am deeply worthy of the love I lavish upon myself, even as I feel the love that surrounds me and strengthens me.

I am love. I am light. I am the power of myself made manifest. I am.

From one of my new favorite enlightened bloggers: NonDuality
You are a combination of hardware and software. Hardware is your body and your brain, even your rudimentary animal behaviors. Software is cultural and learnt behavoirs, beliefs and knowledge that sits in the hardware and tells it what to do.

Pretty straight forward, everyone reading this would have thought of this analogy before I am sure.

So why do we allow our software to be corrupted so easily? Why do we let a 1000 hackers work on our core operating system, installing virus’s (marketing, advertising, conditioning, responsibilites, government), recoding large portions (schools, jobs, society) or just causing mayhem.

Think of enlightenment as your own personel firewall. Think of it as the reboot button. Think of it as a defrag and a format.

Walking Through Your Fear from The Daily Om
The situations, activities, and individuals that frighten us remain static. Their relative intensity does not change. Fear, on the other hand, self-magnifies. It is when you are afraid and envisioning all that might go wrong that the energy underlying your fear grows. A tiny flicker of anxiety can easily develop into a terror that manifests itself physically and eventually paralyzes you into inaction. Though frequently, in walking through that fear, we discover that the strength of our fright was out of synch with reality. And we learn that doing what frightens us can lead to great blessings. Confronting your trepidation head-on will help you accept that few frightening scenarios will ever live up to the negative disasters that we sometimes play out in our minds.

Though fear is literally an evolutionary gift meant to sharpen your senses and energize you during times of great stress, it can nonetheless become a barrier that prevents you from fulfilling your potential by causing you to miss out on rewarding, life-changing experiences. During the period before you face your fear, you may have to deal with a barrage of negative thoughts and emotions. Walking through it, whether your fear is public speaking, taking part in an activity that makes you nervous, or asserting yourself when the odds are against you, may be equally as difficult. But once you have emerged unscathed on the other side, which you will, you will likely wonder why you assumed the worst in the first place. As you spend time worrying about what might happen, it’s good to know that your fear probably won’t happen at all. It may feel like a great weight has been lifted from your shoulders, and you will likely feel a sense of passionate pride. Walking through your fear can mean taking risks and can require both practice and patience. Since it is challenging to act when you are gripped with fear, start small.
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