Note to self: Ditch the long titles. They look really weird on the home page.

I’m a big fan of The Secret. I’ve the read the book a few times and watched the DVD enough to scratch it. Luckily, it’s an original, so it doesn’t scratch.

On some days, I wish I hadn’t discovered The Secret. It’s too much pressure. See, religion is easy. When anything good happens, we thank God. When anything bad happens, The Devil must have done it. I don’t need to make a decision, I just follow the writings in a big Holy Book, and if I do it right, or get saved, or perform virgin-earning services, I can scrape past the firey gates. Easy peasy.

But when you have no religion, things get a little … tricky. On one hand, it’s cool that I pick my own right and wrong. On the other hand, so does everyone else. Which means there’s no standard, and I can’t complain if my right is someone else’s left wrong. If, for example, my best friend’s morality says it’s okay to sleep with my husband, then I can’t really complain. Similarly, with The Secret, everything in my life is entirely up to me. I can’t look to higher powers for voodoo hexes or miracles. It all happens within my mind. And that’s scary.

I take my baby to Sunday School every week. It’s a great excuse to bond with her grand-dad, and I don’t want her to rebel against nothing. When she finally starts to question her faith – because at some point, we all do – then it would help if she had some basis of faith to question.

But I’ve never liked church, and I don’t quite have faith anymore. It took all of last week to decide who to pray to, since I can’t call on deities whose presence I doubt, and ‘Dear Powers Of The Universe’ is a bit of a mouthful. I settled for ‘Mr Universe’, because it can’t be inanimate, and I’m not enough of a feminist to call it a Ms.

In my own mind, I’m really lazy, but mostly I’m an overachiever. I set my bar so high that I have to stand on a ladder and tiptoe just to see it, and I don’t like to tiptoe. I can’t even do high heels! Which is why I think I’m lazy.

But if I step back for a second and look through other [people’s] eyes, I realise I’ve done a lot. In one year of working with The Secret, I’ve managed to get my soulmate, my dream job, a cool flat, a good school, and perfect hair. Sweet!

But one thing I have trouble with is money. I was able to manifest stuff that wasn’t urgent, because I could leave it to The Universe and its perfect timing. But when I need a set figure on a set date or else, it gets a little harder to let go and let God The Powers Of The Universe.

Every time I watch The Secret, I learn something new. Working the Law Of Attraction is a three-step process: Ask, Believe, Receive. To ask is to make a wish. To believe is to accept that it can happen, and to receive is to act like you already have it. I realised that while I was okay with asking, visualizing and thanking, I didn’t have the ‘believe’ part down. I’m so intellectual that it was hard for me to stop analysing potential ‘hows’, and that stifled my magnetic ability. I had no mental concept of how the stuff would happen, and therefore I couldn’t see it happening.

Once I got over that hurdle, I realised that the timing sucked. In the video, Jack Canfield says how he manifested $100,000 in a year [though it ended up being $92,327 or something like that]. Joe Vitale says, ‘Intend to have $25,000 in thirty days, but pick a time and scope that’s believable for you.’ Well, I’ve been trying for X amount of money in two weeks, and it sucks because with every day that passes, I get much closer to panic.

The thing with LOA is that when you panic, you kill it. The more you get afraid, the more you build resistance, and the more you weaken your own magnet. Yet with every day your wish doesn’t appear, you get more and more panicked. It’s classic FCT – Fox Chasing Tail. Yes, I like abbreviations.

Last week, I was able to manifest a tortilla. A tortilla for f***s sake! But I can’t quite manifest the Xsh I require because I want it too badly and need it too much. There’s has to be some way to focus on this with passion and not scare it away in the process, but I don’t know what it is.

Joe Vitale says there isn’t a specific timetable for exactly when you’ll manifest something. It could take 3 minutes, 3 days, or 3 years. I’m cool with that for some manifestations, and I guess the relaxed attitude will help them come faster. But sometimes, you only have two weeks!

Lisa Nichols says The Universe knows the quickest shortest way to manifest, so you have to just trust its timing. She says its not your job to change the world or the people in it. You just have to flow with The Universe and celebrate its parameters.

Now that’s all very nice … but I still have that two week deadline that I’d like to beat, and patience is not my strong suit. Help!