Complaining

Complaining, like all thought patterns, is not mere observation.  Complaining is a creative act.  The more you complain, the more you summon your creative energies to attract something to complain about.  Your complaints may seem fully justified, but realize that whenever you complain, you are placing your order for more of the same.  Complaining is not merely about the past.  Whenever you make a complaint, realize you are setting an intention — a goal — for the future.

Note that complaining is not the same thing as having a negative emotional reaction.  That first-response negative reaction is OK.  Complaining is the act of reinforcing what you don’t want and intending even more of it.  It’s the act of dwelling on the negative.

People who complain trap themselves in a reality that constantly gives them more to complain about.  Life keeps harshing on them.  Their luck is below average.  They never get any real breaks.  Unfortunate circumstances, seemingly beyond their control, keep manifesting.  It seems totally unfair, but it isn’t.  The complainers are merely witnessing the fulfillment of their own requests.  Every thought is an intention, and complainers habitually intend what they don’t want.  So it makes perfect sense they live in a reality congruent with those thoughts.  The complainer may tell you their reality is causing their complaints, but it’s more accurate to say their reality is reflecting their complaints.

Complaining is also addictive.  The more you do it, even within your own mind, the more it becomes an ingrained habit and the harder it is to stop.

Complaining and the Law of Attraction

I’ve seen many a person claim to be using the Law of Attraction properly, holding only positive intentions and thinking predominantly about what they want to attract.  Then after a few weeks of little or no results, they fire off an explosion of complaints:

This LoA stuff is nonsense!  I gave it a real shot, and it isn’t working for me.  Why haven’t my intentions manifested yet?  Why does this seem to work for other people but not me?  I’ve wasted a lot of time on this and have nothing to show for it!  Robble robble robble!

People who really grasp the LoA won’t do this sort of thing.  It’s like planting a seed and then digging it up in a wild thrashing manner to see if it’s growing.  You just killed the plant in the process.  Now consider this:  If someone finds it necessary to kill their plant to verify it’s growing, did they really expect/intend the plant to survive and thrive in the first place?  Obviously not.  If you know the plant will grow, you won’t dig it up.  Similarly, if you intend with certainty that your intention is going to manifest, you won’t lash out with complaints about your failure.  You’ll simply continue holding the intention until it does manifest, no matter how long it takes.

In practice you will see some intenders hold their intentions patiently for months and years, while complainers will usually give up within the first 30 days.  Why?  You might not like what I’m going to say, but the truth is that the complainers were predisposed to eventually give up.  Failure was their true background intention.

You see… people who backlash at the LoA for not giving them what they want never fully embraced the LoA in the first place.  They were always expecting to fail, simply paying lip service to the idea of positive intentions.  But their background thinking remained negative.

You can’t fool the LoA.  It knows your true expectations, and it isn’t going to release its treasures to those it knows will eventually give up.

Intentions and time

Recognize that the LoA is timeless, not time-bound.  Here’s how I like to think of it:  Any thought you hold at any time is a timeless intention, so all thoughts in all times influence your results in all times.  Now that’s a gross overgeneralization, but if you accept it as true, it will help you understand why you must treat your intentions as timeless commitments.

Your lifetime of thoughts acts like a resonating band of intention.  That band’s overall signature determines what kind of life you live.  A chronic complainer will manifest a predominantly negative life.  A positive thinker will manifest a predominantly positive life.

Your thoughts/intentions are not time-bound.  If you’re going to complain at some point in the future, that complaint will subtly affect you today.

Let me give you a real-world example.  Suppose your car broke down this morning, and it was totally unexpected.

What caused that breakdown?  Some might say it’s the laws of physics.  An LoA advocate might say that you were unconsciously putting out intentions before then to manifest the breakdown, perhaps for reasons that may not be clear to you.  However, I’m suggesting something else may have caused the accident.

How did you react to the breakdown after it happened?  Did you complain about it?  Did you keep going over it in your mind, making your negative reaction stronger and stronger?  Do you realize all those thoughts are intentions?  I’m actually suggesting that your act of complaining about the accident after it happened is what manifested the accident in the first place.  If you weren’t going to complain about it, the accident might never have happened.

I know this runs contrary to how most people think about cause and effect.  However, if you play with this idea for a bit, you’ll come to a new understanding of the LoA, one which I believe is more consistent with its actual functioning.  If you begin to see intentions as running backward and forward through time, you’ll recognize just how crucial it is to keep your thoughts positive at all times if you want to manifest a positive life.  Even complaining about the past is a thought pattern you must eventually drop.

People commonly assume the LoA only travels forward in time.  I don’t think so.  In fact, I’m fairly certain that isn’t true at all.

The complainer seed

Here’s another way to think about this, one that might be a little easier to accept if you’re very attached to linear thinking.  Consider that if something unfortunate happens to you, and you’re going to complain about it afterwards, then there must have been some kind of complainer seed within you in the first place… before that negative event took place.  You must already have been the kind of person who’s predisposed to complain.  And if that seed is there, you can bet the LoA is going to pick up on it.

Really positive people who are good at manifesting don’t complain.  Even when things don’t go their way, they keep directing their thoughts towards the positive side.  They expect that things will eventually go their way.  They also take action to participate in the positive manifestation.  Setbacks don’t make them throw in the towel and curse the LoA because they don’t harbor the complainer seed.  They’re not going to be perfect about it, but this is their dominant pattern.

If you want to create the life you really want, instead of one you merely tolerate, you must eventually uproot the complainer seed.  This seed is so destructive that it will keep killing the positive seeds you plant.  It knows it can eventually destroy them.  It knows you’re only fooling yourself.  It will make you think the positive seeds you’re planting are really weeds, such as wishful thinking or gullibility.

When you finally recognize that the complainer seed will continue to sabotage your efforts as long as you harbor it, make the conscious decision to dump it.  Only then can your positive intentions take root without being uprooted.

Whenever you catch yourself complaining, visualize that complainer seed, and imagine yourself uprooting it and throwing it away.  Feed it to the birds.  Give it back to Source.  Or just toss it in the garbage.  Then visualize a positive thinking seed, plant it, fertilize it, and water it.  Say to yourself, “I hold the seed of happiness.”

Complaining may be a compelling addiction, but it needn’t be a life sentence.


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© 2007 by Steve Pavlina. If you find these ideas helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.

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