The Little Book of Prosperity

(revised and updated for Crunchier Times)

Maggy Whitehouse 2009

Endorsements for Maggy's books:

 
'We can experience prosperity, health and joy whatever the external circumstances and Maggy can show you how.'
David Hamilton, PhD, author of It's the Thought that Counts (Hay House)

‘Maggy brings together prosperity and spirituality in inspirational, practical and liberating ways.’
Nick Williams, author of The Work We Were Born to Do (Thorsons).
           
'Maggy has lived and breathed this prosperity teaching for a decade and it shows clearly in both her life and her work. She is witty, down-to-earth and unpretentious.'
Jane Struthers, Bella magazine Astrologer and author of The Psychic Bible (Godsfield).

'Abundant wisdom teaching the spiritual laws of prosperity for all to understand and use.’
Dr David Goddard, author of Tower of Alchemy (Weiser)    

'For too many of us, money is the last frontier. Although we’ve made progress in dumping other limiting beliefs, the Money Dragon hangs around. If you’re seriously ready to move from scarcity to a prosperous and joyful way of being in the world, let Maggy Whitehouse be your guide. She’s been on both sides herself and wants you to join her in living the most abundant possible life.’  
Barbara Winter, Author of Making a Living without a Job (Bantam)

Excerpt from Part One:

Feelings and Emotions

The key to all of this book—and to all of prosperity consciousness—is to notice your feelings. Feelings are what the Abraham-Hicks teachings call ‘your emotional guidance system.’ If you feel good, then you are in alignment with your true self, your hopes and dreams and your destiny. If you feel bad, you are out of alignment.

It follows by the Law of Attraction that if you frequently feel bad, then you are going to attract more reasons to feel bad. And if you feel good, you are going to attract more reasons to feel good.

It is that simple. However, no one ever said it was easy.

The trouble is that we are such a confused mess nowadays about feelings! The majority of us have long been trained to tolerate a low level of unhappiness without even noticing it. I discovered this when I made myself take a week’s Sabbatical while at home. I wanted to do a lot more meditation than I had been allowing myself to do and to read a couple of books which had been sitting, gathering dust on my ‘to do’ pile.

During that week I discovered my own level of low-grade chuntering where my mind chewed over so many seemingly-minor grievances and woes. Spending time in the silence of reading or attempting to meditate it was obvious that this groaning went on in my mind virtually all the time. And I didn’t even notice it.

It explained a lot about my life; how I create wonderful things but every now and then I would have a downer that seemed inexplicable. It’s entirely logical now I see that there has been a constant, un-noticed rumbling of discontent.

Interested, I asked some friends about their own levels of muttered grumblings. Every one monitored his or herself for a few days and came back saying ‘yes, it’s true!’ We had been so programmed that we didn’t notice it.

In addition to the grumblings that you may be carrying, there is also crisis addiction. This is just as dangerous as any other addiction and it is constantly fuelled by the media through the News, TV drama and soap operas. Something terrible must always happen any time someone’s getting married or there’s a happy occasion. Even good news must have a naysayer to grind it down to its ‘proper’ proportions. It has a lot to do with the belief that we must suffer for what we want so that we can be perceived to deserve it.

I fell into poverty consciousness at the same time as I got into holistic health. Having been a journalist on live radio and TV for 15 years and then experiencing marriage and widowhood within one year, I was a bona fide crisis addict. As the external influences of the news and a hectic lifestyle were no longer there, I had to create other sources of crisis.

When I married for the second time, I chose a man with his own brand of the same issue. He might be loving and spiritual in himself but his vibrational level, like mine, was a complete see-saw and we fed each other in those swings and roundabouts of crisis addiction. In his case it was issues with work and ex-wife and children and I picked up on all that energy and thought I was being supportive while in fact I was making myself feel dreadful. And if I felt dreadful there was no possibility that I could be prosperous. I simply didn’t realise that and I sincerely apologise to all those to whom I taught mental prosperity consciousness for not understanding or explaining the importance of feelings. I did the best I could with the knowledge that I had at the time and I’m not beating myself up about it but looking back, it’s very, very clear that I was not allowing myself to be happy.

When my ex and I broke up (and there’s a story of major crises involving three countries, eleven house moves and a beagle) I finally got the point and began working for real on creating a true prosperity consciousness.

Slowly but surely I learnt that it is one thing to learn theory and another to live it; one thing to be spiritual and another actually to be happy. And one thing to attract prosperity and another to allow it in. In the old days, it was fits and starts but now it’s steady and sustaining. The difference is all in how I feel.

So, back to the Abraham-Hicks teachings. They have a wonderful phrase which is: ‘Nothing is more important than you feel good.’

Nothing is more important than you feel good. Wherever you can in life, do things that make you feel good. Even on the worst day, you can do something that makes you feel good even if only briefly. That’s one of the prime reasons for visualisation: go somewhere in your mind where you feel good.

There is a difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings are transitory; you can feel bad one moment and good the next. You can cry at a sad movie and then laugh with a friend ten minutes later. Emotions are deeper-seated. They come from long training and they are usually the trouble-makers when it comes to prosperity consciousness. Negative emotions are the cause of the chuntering thoughts that create the low-grade unhappiness. They are such a deep and acknowledged part of the psyche that unless they are triggered into full power by a crisis they are hardly noticeable. Eckhart Tolle, in his wonderful The Power of Now (Mobius), calls them ‘the pain body.’ Every time we give our attention to anything that we don’t like the look of (someone’s behaving in a way we disapprove of; the news is bad; there’s a new rampaging sickness in the world) we feed this pain body and make it stronger. There are only two solutions: cold turkey from the News and soap operas and focusing on what we do want rather than what we don’t want.

Heck, we give attention to the guy who’s trying to beat us up for doing something which we thought was totally inoffensive, and we beat ourselves up far more effectively than he does! Its us that hurts us; not them. Generally, they only do it once and we repeat their action a thousand times.

It’s the same with the word ‘want.’ Did your parents ever say to you, ‘I want doesn’t get’? The word ‘want’ is redolent with emotion for many of us. When we were very young we gloried in wanting things but we were taught again and again that wanting led to disappointment so we stopped daring to want and we learnt that it was selfish to want.

So, often, we scupper ourselves in prosperity consciousness by not recognising, when we set our goals or do our visualisations, that we are feeling negative emotion around the word ‘want.’ To do an affirmation with a negative emotion hovering around is a worthless exercise. Worse, it’s an exercise in bringing the opposite. So make sure that you find and use words that don’t have negative contexts for you in order to feel good when you do any of your prosperity work (or should that be prosperity play?). My favourite affirmation for getting over that problem is an adaptation of one from Florence Scovel Shinn, the author of The Game of Life and How to Play It: (Fowler):

Thy will be done this day O Source of all Love. This day is a day of completion. I give thanks for this perfect day where miracle follows miracle and wonders never cease.

That one gets round most emotional blocks..

You can never make the world a better place by focusing on the things about it that make you feel miserable. It’s a long road to happiness and sometimes we have to walk it inch by inch but the secret to all of it is to seek joy in the moment. You can’t get to joy on a road filled with misery so make sure that you constantly seek something pleasant whenever you can, whether it’s cuddling an animal, smelling a flower or even having a cigarette. What they think is not important. What you feel is all-important. Just five minutes a day of uninterrupted happy thought will turn your life around. When was the last time you had a week when you experienced five minutes of uninterrupted happy thoughts every single day? You can do it; certainly nobody else can.

Click here to buy The Little Book of Prosperity.