You attract what you fear most.
I heard these words while watching an episode of OWN’s Super Soul Sunday. It happened to be during a period in my life when I was at a crossroad of confusion and discontentment. I wasn’t feeling the direction my life was going in. Though there was a panel of guests on the show, they were all spewing out this idea that “You attract what you fear” while referencing the book, The Secret. This international bestseller is basically 200 pages of sensationalized stories using the “law of attraction” as a guide. I was familiar with the notion that “like attracts like,” but the idea of drawing what I was scared of and had tried to avoid for so long sounded ridiculous to me–until I heard more.
Since I crossed the threshold into adulthood, I had an enormous fear of being broke. The thought of having to continuously scramble up enough coins to get by from check to check was frightening to me. Seriously, you would have thought that I’d been born in a third world country and was afraid to go back. My head would ache at the thought of having to ask my parents to bail me out of a financial mess simply because my money was funny, and I knew I didn’t want to live a life like that. Then to add to that feeling, I was also scared of not figuring out what I was supposed to do with my life. I feared living a life that lacked purpose. So there I was, obsessing about the two things I knew I didn’t want in my life, constantly trying to figure out ways to ensure I wouldn’t end up broke and lost. I never realized that obsessing over such things was actually attracting those situations.
You will do more to avoid pain than you would to achieve pleasure. That is what the you-attract-what-you-fear notion says. It’s like imagining the universe as a tool that understands only emotions and how you feel. Actors like Denzel Washington and Will Smith have also co-signed this ideal emphasizing that when you keep saying negative things and feeling fear, this is what you’re going to get more of. When I operated that way, I immediately began to see instances in my life where fear manifested itself in situations I didn’t want to happen. I feared being broke. For this reason, I didn’t step out of my comfort zone and take risks to make possibly more money. My fear of being broke was holding me back, causing me to have a “broke girl” mentality.
Here’s another example that may be more relatable. Take a woman who fears being in a bad relationship. She goes out of her way to make sure she doesn’t fall prey to a manipulative man. She ends up going through his phone and accuses him of things that she only assumes happened. All of this is a result of trying to protect herself from heartache. In turn, she drives herself crazy with the dialogue she’s made up in her head and ultimately runs her man away with her accusations. She ends up brokenhearted anyway.
Though I’m not an avid follower of metaphysical principles, I do understand and agree with the “law of attraction.” I believe that what you focus your mind on, you become. So by obsessing over negative things and what I didn’t want, I was, in fact, putting out that energy and becoming and living what I didn’t want.
So how did I change? Well, first I acknowledged my fears. I was afraid of not having money. I was fearful of just existing and not living. And I was even more afraid that I would allow my talents to go to waste and not fulfill my purpose. I was afraid that I wouldn’t find love one day and would be forever single. These were the things that consumed me.
Once I heard the words “You attract what you focus on,” I began to think of the things I wanted as opposed to the things I didn’t. I even created a vision board to accompany my new thought process. The idea is to replace a negative emotion with a positive one. Once I began doing this, my life started to change. I felt more confident and positive and became more productive. My mind was full of less clutter, allowing me to focus more on the things that were of more priority and purpose in my life.
I get it. In a day and age when some people are attaching successful celebrities to “illuminatic” principles, people are afraid to expand their thoughts on metaphysical laws (that’s a whole other story for another day); but this isn’t that. It’s simply saying that “as a man thinketh, in his heart, so is he,” and that’s in the Bible. To sum it all up: Whatever you believe, you eventually become. I believed so much in my fears that, for a while, I had become the things I disliked, faced the things I was fearful of most. But once I shifted my thoughts, I got better. Life got better. My life became one of less fear and more happiness.
