I'm reading a book right now - Extraordinary Knowing, by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer.  It's a book about non-ordinary experiences people have had in their lives in general, or in the realms of healing and medical experiences.  Elizabeth Mayer starts out the book with a description of how she is both a psychoanalyst and a scientist - a skeptic in many ways - and how an experience with a dowser changed her reality.  Her daughter had lost a valuable harp and, after exhausting all other options for finding it, Elizabeth decided to consult with a dowser a thousand or so miles away.  The fact that the dowser found the harp, and that it was returned to Elizabeth because she used the information the dowser gave her, rocked her world in a powerful way.  It started her on an exploration of non-ordinary experience in everyday life.

Reading this book got me to thinking again of how very powerful it is to become immersed in the stories of people who have touched into a reality that is larger than our everyday, three-dimensional world.  As a general rule, people feel better when they imagine that there is something greater than themselves, and these kinds of stories offer inspiration and a sense that there is, indeed, a much bigger context out there.

For this week's experiment, I invite you to be conscious of gathering inspiring stories and immersing yourself in them.  From the perspective of hypnosis and self-hypnosis, the things we fill up with color our perceptions and feelings.  From an energy point of view, the things we fill up with bring with them their tone and "frequency", and we begin to resonate with the qualities of the stories we carry inside us.

This experiment doesn't ask you to make yourself believe in things that seem unbelievable to you.  Rather, it invites you to actively engage in seeking out stories and pieces of news that lift your spirits, that offer you positive and nourishing psychological and spiritual food.  Then, after you've immersed yourself in an uplifting story of some kind, notice what happens in your body . . . in your thoughts . . . in your emotions . . . in your interactions with the world around you.  Pay attention to the quality and tone of what you bring into your world when you move out from a place of inspiration and well-being.  Then, notice what happens to you if you come upon a story that is the opposite of inspiring - a story of fear, lack, or uncertainty.

What we fill ourselves up with matters, and this week's experiment offers one more opportunity to make conscious decisions about the qualities with which you want to resonate as you go forward into your everyday activities.  As with all these experiments, remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion and to pat judgments gently on the head as you let them simply arise, move through and then move on.