They say they built the train tracks over the Alps before there was a train that could make the trip. They built it anyway. They knew one day the train would come. Any arbitrary turning along the way, and I would be elsewhere.

This is a quote from one of my favourite feel-good movies “Under the Tuscan Sun” and has earned its way into a list of the most meaningful anecdotes of my life. Whether it is a direct quote from the book on which the film is based, by Frances Mayes, I have yet to find out since the book is still on my to-read list, though I have seen the film maybe a dozen times in the last half-decade. Whenever its golden Italian vistas call to me, like diving into a pot of honey, as they did (yet again) just a couple of days ago, I am struck by the synchronicity of my choice since there always seems to be a particular reason my hand reached for it out of the cupboard. There’s always a sense, by the end, of knowing why I needed to go through the journey of its plot and hear those ending lines one more time, usually in perfect dovetail with something else I happen to be preoccupied with; and non-linear experience has certainly been on my mind a great deal these last few weeks. Playing with time, in the most fluid of ways, is always like building train tracks for trains that don’t exist; yet build those tracks we do, trusting the train will come…

Only that morning, I had been reading (see below) all about the quantum aspect that is at play whenever we, in effect, live ahead of time…acting as though we already have the life we want; like are already “there”. I was reading this description over breakfast, not freshly, as though this was news to me, but appreciatively for all the many times I have done this in my own life. These have been the most powerfully transformative times of my life; the times that defied all logic or coherent “cause then effect” explanation. Of this, I could give you just so many examples but will pluck just a few.

For instance, a little over a decade ago, doing this very thing saved me from the very brink of destruction and altered the trajectory of life for both me and my daughter in ways that still astonish me. I was facing bankruptcy, being told by advisors that I needed to urgently sell my house, liquidate my assets (such as they were, heavily mortgaged as I was), dump my debts and start over. I likely faced moving well out of area, away from all familiarity and friends, to be able to afford to start over again, property where I live being amongst the most expensive in the country, and would have had very modest means with which to do this.  I was the single parent of a five year old child, had no relatives in a position to help out and was already failing to make ends meet with a series of lodgers and two jobs that had me frazzled beyond belief. On top of all that, my health was literally cascading around my ears. So what did I do?

For no apparent reason except it made me feel better, I found myself envisioning keeping that house, in spite of all the sternest advice to let it go, and kept feeling such waves of appreciation for the fact I was still living in it. In a way that helped me transcend the dire circumstances I was otherwise wallowing in, I could so clearly see myself still in it, years and years hence, and not all alone there but in a stable relationship with someone wonderful (I already knew who I had in mind though they were in no position to commit to me at that time) and with two happy children and a dog sat around that fireplace. I saw all the warm colours in the room, could feel the happy vibe under that roof, hear laughter ringing out, almost taste the joyful family meals where we chattered playfully over the spread of food, caught glimpses of lemon sunlight through windows and flashing through leaves on many country walks and holidays where we seemed to be bundling our way joyously though what could only be described as a truly golden life.

I didn’t just imagine all this in an abstract way; it became my familiar reverie, somewhere I lost myself when I was in a state of no-thought, like I was remembering rather than trying to conjure something out of nothing. In other words, I was “already there”; sending coherent, repetitious signals towards that future potential like radio signals calling such a reality to myself. Its been a while now since I first had the epiphany that I made that life almost exactly as (perhaps better than) I first envisioned it; it has been the story of the last twelve years of my life. How did I do it; how did those logistics shape shift to achieve the impossible, where did the unexpected cashflow come from, how did someone (me?) orchestrate my life, against all the odds, into these wonderful shapes that leave me in no doubt that I am powerful and blessed, that our kids have had the most golden childhood, that we have achieved the nigh-on impossible? Because I reached forwards into that future and I made it mine, outside of time or logic. I claimed a non-linear reality ahead of time and locked onto it as my destination; and the GPS of my non-linear navigation system (my intention, fuelled by love and appreciation) did all the rest. Its a resonance thing; when we lock onto something powerfully with both heart and mind, it creates an electro-magnetic signal (heart = magnetic, mind = electric) which does the work for us in the quantum field; a sort of fishing line sent out into the ether to reel in our next-best experience. You could say (as I often do…) its yin and yang working most powerfully together when this happens.

I recognise how I’ve done the same thing so many times in my life that I could be here all day talking about it (and I suspect we all have these tales to tell, though we tend not to give them the attention they deserve). I did it with art; through the way that I first envisioned myself (in a hypnosis session, over 12 years ago) hanging work on the walls of a beautiful gallery before skipping off to meet a friend for lunch then spending the afternoon painting some more. Everything in that reverie was tinged with sunlight;  I could see it pooling on the wooden floor, felt warmth of sun on my face as I drove my car, could so feel I was in my element, that my life was delicious, spacious, inspired and exciting. Why was this daydream such a revelation when it first happened to me? Because, at the time, It wasn’t – in any real sense – a graspable reality; I was hardly what you could describe “an artist” (had only just started dabbling in paints 6 months before) and had never had work hung in an exhibition in my life. Within 18 months of those two or three hypnosis sessions, where I was relaxed enough, under the hypnotist’s guidance, to imagine my “perfect day”, my extremely amateur artwork was talent-spotted by a prestigious art gallery following a totally impromptu conversation with the manager when I happened to pop in there to gaze at the kind of artwork I was in awe of.  In fact, if my little daughter hadn’t piped up (very loudly) that I painted, we would never have even got chatting. It was some time after that – many months, in fact –  when the penny dropped that this was the very art gallery, five miles from my house, that I had envisioned in my hypnotic reverie. I had walked through that idealised day in my mind’s eye, filling it with some very tangible details, familiarizing myself with the way they felt from the inside and I had then committed them to memory to the point the “experience” was as real to me as anything that had ever happened in my past…and here I was, now living them as my daily reality. I had grasped my, albeit ambitious, choice out of the infinite sea of probabilities and had declared to the universe “this one please”, making it mine by slotting it into the recognisable structures (familiar places) of my life.

My health has taken a massive leap forwards this year; in fact, I honestly feel superb. After so much stop-starting over the last decade, I can’t hep noticing that the biggest difference is that I have reached the point where my only desire is to live that long-sought “healthy life” in a great feeling body and have no patience left with anything less than being there already; I simply won’t put my life on hold any longer. Living immersed in symptoms that distracted me daily was like a constant anchor into the “now” and I needed to make that quantum leap, so I did. With no orchestration on my part,  I see how my whole mindset has subtly yet significantly shifted since the start of the year. Above all, I’ve stepped up my yoga practice to a more intense and coherent daily routine, plus a weekly coaching session (the benefits of having a yogi-husband), that presupposes I can do everything on that list and will only get better at it, day by day by day. There’s no more compromise, no more “can’t”, no more conditionality based on a presupposition that my body can do any less than anybody else’s; from which perspective I am now noticing just how great my body is for a woman of nearly 50 rather than starting from the base-line of thinking there is anything wrong with me. I feel excited about my own physicality and I never loved my own body, and what it is capable of, more than I do right now. I have developed great respect for what it can do, yet I have taken the reins of what I believe it is capable of, asserting that I know better than some of its learned behaviours.

Going in at this tangent, I’m marvelling at the daily transformation of my body and how strong and capable I have become in record time; how much I am loving the feel of my body and can honestly say I feel in better shape than I have for decades. This last week, I’ve spent time in the garden shifting heavy furniture, shovelling gravel and more, coping amazingly well with the demands I have put on my body and with no adverse effects including none of the chronic fatigue that used to wipe me at the merest exhertion. A friend seeing me for the first time since Christmas remarked how I look completely different….stronger, more toned, lithe, upright, healthy and glowing; she couldn’t believe it. I know! I can feel it from the inside and it’s the feeling I give conscious fuel to just as soon as I wake up in the morning, as the very last thought before I sleep and as my “go to” whenever I feel grateful for my health, which is often; in fact I feel Amazonian! I’m no longer benchmarking myself by my health-past or even the occasional dip in my health-present but, rather, identifying myself strongly with a future me that  enjoys awesome health and stops traffic with how glowing and fit they look, regardless of age. I smile at the tongue-in-cheek part of that daydream and yet…I know…I owe it to myself to envision my very best, most fit and radiant future since its mine as soon as I tune into it so unwaveringly that I no longer doubt that its waiting for me to claim it as my present. I see this so clearly now that I find I just want to shout about it so that everyone can stop compromising their future with the compulsively low expectations that are, really, the only obstacle on their path (pause for laughter as “I can see clearly now the rain has gone” has just started playing on my iPod like an emphatic nod from the universe).

The fact I have written about time an awful lot lately (…as I glance down at the last few titles “Outside of Time“, “When Sound Spirals Through Time“; even “The Rescue Party of Myself” and “Out of the Box” were on this topic) tells me not that I am stuck in a groove by that I have some powerful and compelling “real life” stuff to share on this non-linearity topic. The reason why is that I have now stepped outside of any pretence that time is all; am able to take it, at last, as the least serious or dictatorial influence upon my life of anything going on…hard-edged and nonnegotiable though it can seem. When you start to realise that time was only ever meant to be fun and playful, or like a banister rail that you can hold onto to steady yourself on the winding staircase of life (…but that you can also let go of it if you want to, can slide down the rail, gallop ahead to the top or peer up and down the stairwell to appreciate several levels at once), this is when the creator part of yourself steps forwards as the consciously creating artist of your life. You get to stop doing that self-depreciating thing I notice so many people do, scrunching up their faces and emphatically shaking their heads declaring “Oh no no…I’m not artistic, I don’t know how to paint, I don’t have that art gene, I couldn’t create a thing if I tried, was all fingers and thumbs in my art lessons…” and get on with owning up to the fact you are creating things all the time. In fact, you were always doing it…creating your own future…but you, perhaps, held back from making your pictures as bright or colourful as you really wanted or tried to stay neatly within the lines (other people’s lines) that they said you had to keep to.

Experience goes quantum when we daub the colours and shapes of the future life that we truly want and really engage with that, stepping into the picture of it ahead of time; blurring out the hard lines around the edges that try to insist that what we imagine is fiction and has no basis in the cause-and-effect reality of our present existence (we can scrub all that when we go quantum). This is how we create futures that are most powerfully aligned with what we really want and which are (necessarily) quite different to anything we have ever experienced before, or that we could logically explain as a continuation of the timeline of our current life (forget logic; we are hopping onto a whole new trajectory when we make these leaps).

This future reality has to be quite unexpected, unfeasible seeming, at least just a little bit “how on earth…?” or how would we know we had made such a leap, from one reality into another; this is how we get to experience just how powerful we are, thus getting the feeling of it so we can do it again and again. By slinging our hook at what we choose, we get to materialise what we want to become “solid” out of the infinite probabilities in the quantum field; manifesting the wave into the particle of our experience. This takes disengaging from “what is” in our present reality, and all that we have known before, to make room for a new reality that has no foundation in present-day logic since, by definition, it can’t rely on that to manifest. We have to be prepared to make that quantum leap first and then leave the rest (all that logic that we like to see slotting into place in our three-dimensional reality, to explain what happens in the sequential way our left hemisphere copes with the best) to shape shift around us. The new reality comes to us because we asked it to, like a retriever bringing us the ball we asked it to go fetch…which, with remarkable efficiency, it does; I know this since it has delivered all the very best bits of the story of my life!

When we do this, to quote the book I’m reading, “we become the elevated power that transcends the past, heals the present, and opens door to the future”. Doing this takes a leap of faith; that same “faith” ingredient that so many religions have talked about, only somewhere along the way we missed the point that what we need to have faith in is our own creator-abilities; we are the one doing that creating, sculpting our own life-landscape ready for our next quantum leap. Like building a train track long before we even know how to invent the train that will, one day, make that journey between places separated by a vast mountain range of circumstance, the very act of behaving as though we already have the answer to the question is what sets in motion the most powerful shape-shifting manoeuvers of our life.

Recommended reading

As an invaluable handbook to help you consciously explore the quantum aspect of your own experience and to help you get over some of the tripping points (body, space, time, the subconscious mind…) on the way to materialising your own golden future, I heartily recommend “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One” by Dr. Joe Dispenza. Taken from his website –  “As a researcher, Dr. Joe explores the science behind spontaneous remissions and how people heal themselves of chronic conditions and even terminal diseases. He’s more recently begun partnering with other scientists to perform extensive research on the effects of meditation during his advanced workshops”.