Life in the Vortex

“The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless.” ~ Thomas Merton

Have you ever really stopped to smell nature? Lavender in the summer sun. Damp moss after the rain. Cedarwood in an old forest. Freshly cut grass. Wild herbs. Pine needles warming in the sunshine. The earthy smell of the soil after a storm.

ABRAHAM-HICKS What does "preparing yourself" mean? It means assuming that reality and self definition, so creating that vibrational "atmosphere". It means sidestepping the old reality as it dissipates and not re-echoing it. What beliefs would create the reality you prefer?

A Texas housewife told her husband to call in sick. No one was hurt. They had plans either. She asked him to lie. She told him to stay home because a stranger was driving to their house that day to tell them they’d won a house. And she wanted him there to see it. She even warned him to act surprised when the man tells us. Her husband was confused. Nobody had called. No letter had come. No one had told her a single word. She just knew. But, the contest was real. Formica had run it nationwide, tied to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The grand prize wasn’t a toaster or a gift card. It was the actual World’s Fair Home, built on a lot of your choosing, anywhere in America. One point five million people entered. That afternoon, a marketing director from Formica knocked on a door in Dallas, walked in, and set a scale model of a house on the family’s table. The house they’d just won. Her husband acted surprised. She didn’t have to. Her name was Helen Hadsell. And the Formica house wasn’t a fluke. By the end of her life she claimed more than 5,000 prizes won. A 1971 book cover called her the woman who wins every contest she enters. You’ve seen her, even if you don’t know it. Every manifestation reel on your feed traces back to her four words: Picture it. Feel it. Know it. Receive it. But those reels leave out the one part that actually made it work. The part that turned “wishing” into 5,000 wins. it’s sitting right there in her own biography, in plain sight. Almost nobody reads far enough to find it. The first thing you need to know is that Helen didn't become a contest-winning machine overnight. Her family had been entering contests since 1948. For roughly ten years, they barely won anything. Then something changed. Helen took a correspondence course in contest writing. She learned that judges weren't necessarily looking for the most expensive product description or the most elaborate entry. They wanted something different. Something memorable. Something clever. Something that made them laugh. In a later newspaper interview, she explained that humor had won more contests for her than almost anything else. She even developed a personal motto: "Pun for the money." Her husband Pat helped write many of their entries. They studied competitions, exchanged ideas with other contestants, and became increasingly skilled at understanding what made an entry stand out. By 1963, Helen was president of a Dallas-area writing and contesting club called the Competriots. Think about that for a moment. The woman later celebrated for bending reality had spent years developing a very practical skill: "understanding how to win." And that brings us to the part that makes her story genuinely fascinating. In her book, The Name It and Claim It Game, Helen introduced a four-step philosophy called SPEC: S — Select it. Decide exactly what you want. It can't be a vague wish or a collection of contradictory desires. Choose one outcome. P — Project it. Create a mental picture of the outcome. See it clearly. Make it specific. Imagine yourself experiencing it. E — Expect it. Develop the expectation that your desired outcome is possible. Stop treating it as something reserved for other people. C — Collect it. Be ready to receive it. Recognize opportunities. Take action. Follow through. She believed this approach could be applied to winning contests and to the bigger game of life. But I think we should look beyond manifestation. There is a psychological principle hiding inside her method. "When you become clear about what you want, you give your attention a direction. When you mentally rehearse an outcome, you become more familiar with the actions required to pursue it. When you expect progress to be possible, you may become more willing to attempt things you previously avoided." And when you repeatedly act on that expectation, you begin collecting real evidence that your old limitations weren't permanent. This doesn't mean thoughts can override probability, guarantee a lottery win, or force the universe to deliver a particular outcome. Helen's contest history actually gives us a more interesting lesson. Instead of just imagining winning, she learned how to write better entries. She practiced. She participated. She improved. She made herself better at recognizing opportunities other people overlooked. Her imagination gave her a target. Her actions gave her a chance of reaching it. And this is where the story connects to your subconscious mind. Your subconscious is constantly learning from what you repeatedly think, experience, and do. If you repeatedly tell yourself that you're terrible at something, avoid every opportunity to practice it, and interpret every mistake as proof of your inadequacy, you're reinforcing a familiar pattern. But imagine doing the opposite. You choose a new direction. You mentally rehearse the person you want to become. You begin acting in ways that support that identity. And you keep going long enough to collect evidence that you can change. Eventually, the old automatic response doesn't have to be the only response available to you. That's the real power of mental reprogramming. Changing the internal patterns that influence how you respond to those events instead of controlling every event that happens to you. Becaue you simply can't. Helen Hadsell spent decades teaching people to play what she called the game of life. And perhaps her most valuable lesson can be condensed into four questions: What do I actually want? Can I picture myself achieving it? Am I willing to believe it is possible? What am I doing today to make it more likely? Because the most dangerous programming is the kind you never question. And the most liberating moment is when you finally realize you can start writing a different program. Stop living by default. Start choosing deliberately. That's how you begin to rewire your reality. What do you think?