Recapping the 30 days of ‘yes’

In case you missed Natalie’s article in 2010, here’s a quick recap. 

In June last year, at 34, even though on paper life looked pretty good and ticked all the right boxes, I felt an overwhelming desire to croak.

Fortunately, I chose not to do anything so dramatic and instead chose to say ‘yes’ to everything that life gave me for 30 days to test the theory that ‘resistance’ was at the root of my problem.

Not only did I realise that resistant thought was one 100% responsible for my unhappiness, but I also discovered that the peace I was seeking in croaking was available to me right now, here in life, without one thing having to change.

Ever since the ’30 days’ experiment, I have become so excited about the subject of resistance and the power of transformation that comes with softening resistant thought.

One thing that really came to a head during those 30 days was the experience I had with plastic surgery about 18 months earlier.

You can also read it in its entirety here.

by Natalie Carey

I would say that I have resisted my appearance for the majority of my life. I have vague memories of being very little and feeling total connection to my Source, and chasing butterflies, marvelling in the beauty of a blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds, or patting my dog and feeling so much love for the soft-haired creature who stared adoringly into my eyes.

Then I recall starting school, and although I do not remember my exact thought process, I remember how I started to gain an awareness of the differences in physical appearance amongst my classmates. I would compare myself to other little girls who had beautiful long straight hair (mine was a frizzy bird-nest) and pretty angelic faces (I was somewhat odd looking).

Then I started picking up on conversations about looks and physical appearance…. Introducing… my brother. Eight years older than I and a complete girl magnet, rugged, blonde, blue-eyed, and a complete little hellion, he had the girls chasing him around every corner.

I so idolised my brother who would sometimes say I was weird and state how I didn’t look a thing like my pretty friends. Please, allow me to make this very clear that I hold absolutely no victimhood in relation to him or my upbringing – I so appreciate the value that these experiences have given me!

So, from a very early age, I formed this belief (which is nothing more than a thought that has been repeated over and over) that I was weird and odd. As I went through high school, feelings of unworthiness because I did not look as pretty as other girls deepened and this followed me into my early twenties. I smile at myself when I say ‘they followed me’ like I simply didn’t have a choice in the matter, but in those days I honestly didn’t have a clue about how the power of my thought and focus created my reality.

So let’s fast-forward to my early thirties. It all started with a passport photo. My husband and I were travelling to Thailand because I was to study massage over there in the coming months.

One Friday afternoon (my husband was in East Timor at the time serving for the Army) I came home with my passport. As I opened it, my heart just sank and I felt that heavy, sick feeling that I had felt so many times when I looked into the mirror. That moment was the catalyst for me to enquire about dramatic and totally unnecessary plastic surgery to alter the appearance of my face.

All my features looked out of symmetry, I told myself, and I believed the thought that, if only my face would look more symmetrical and petite, I would look pretty, and then I would be happy.

I travelled from Townsville to Sydney and back in one day to consult with a doctor who was quite well known and had a good reputation. A few months after that, with zero attention to my husband’s pleas to change my mind, I went to Sydney and underwent hours of facial surgery.

As I lay in hospital the day after the surgery, it was the first time in my life I had ever felt genuinely scared to the point where the thought flashed through my mind ‘I could die here’. I was in hospital longer than anticipated. The pain was excruciating but it was more than that. It felt like my heart rate had slowed down to the point it was almost non-existent, and all I could do was lie there. It is hard to find the words, but it was almost as if there were a part of me that just wanted to give up, that simply couldn’t believe that I had done this to myself.

While I lay in hospital, I remember a television show coming on called Last Chance Surgery. My goodness how I cried, because it hit me like a sledge hammer that here were people experiencing terrifying illnesses and who were fighting for their lives, and here I was putting myself in such a frighteningly unnecessary position all because I didn’t like the way I looked. It seemed so ludicrous!

After I was discharged I spent the remainder of my time in hostel-like accommodation at a nearby public hospital that was primarily for cancer patients and their families. I was to see the doctor a week after surgery before flying home – 24 hours a day, in a tiny room, and all I had was a mirror to look at.

I knew something was wrong about two days after I was discharged from hospital. The pain and swelling were not subsiding and I looked absolutely terrible. The worst thing I possibly could have done was panic but, as time passed, it was with growing terror that I realised that the way I looked was simply the way I was always going to look.

On the day I was due to fly home, I underwent a secondary procedure. I will never forget the moment before I was to go into surgery. I was talking to a counsellor who came to see me after hearing of my plight. I gave her my driver’s licence and I said, “Look at it. Look at me then” – and I saw the sadness in her eyes as she looked at me and said, “What a pretty photo. There was nothing wrong with you”.

All I could think of at the time was what a terrible mother I was. I went beyond fear of what I now looked like and instead my heart wanted to break in two because here I am, a mother to this beautiful child, and I resisted myself enough to do this. Why wasn’t I at home, safe and sound, being a loving mother?

Understanding now what I know about the resistance and the law of attraction, it comes as absolutely no surprise that I created what I did in my experience.

Initially, my mind questioned what went wrong. I mean, all I ever wanted was to look in the mirror and like what I see. Isn’t that what I had been visualising? Isn’t that what I said I wanted to create?

Let’s look closer. What was my dominant thought? Self-loathing. Fear. Resistance. It is absolutely no accident that I spent $20,000 on unnecessary plastic surgery and look worse for the experience. It is no accident that I attracted the doctor I did or extracted that experience from him. I attracted exactly what was dominant in my vibration.

Let me tell you, it was an extreme way to finally confront the belief that I was not good enough because of the way I looked.

The joke was on me because for most of my life I believed the thought that someone who I perceived to have more geometrically pleasing features was more important and more worthy than me. I had allowed myself to be intimidated by body parts. I would see someone who I believe has more pleasing facial features and I rate them as ‘more important’ and I would look away like I would be disgusting them by making eye contact!

Did this experience finally do it once and for all? That is, did the extremity of the experience finally make appreciate the body that housed my soul?

For most part, absolutely yes, but I will be honest: I have a very long, habitual thought pattern around the subject of my appearance. Every so often the temptation will arise to scrutinise, to compare, but I see it for what it is now – resistant thought – and instead, I choose to appreciate. I can do either. I can smash myself for not looking like girls in the magazines (resistant, conditioned thought) or I can appreciate that true beauty emanates from what I offer internally.

I had a truckload of resistance to soften after this experience. Not only did I have to work with softening the resistance around the thoughts around my physical appearance, but there was the added challenge to accept the fact that I chose this experience and I now look ‘worse’!

Here is the thing – for me, there is no ‘better’ or ‘worse’. ‘Worse’ is just another story. I simply look different from what I once did and different from what I had imagined I would look like. That’s all. Can I not see that beauty exists in it all? It has been a huge realisation to embrace the possibility that all that I had previously believed about my appearance could be a lie. Who says that only this particular physicality is beautiful? Why can’t beauty be in every single thing? Well, it is – it truly is – and true beauty, I discovered, as clichéd as it sounds, really does emanate from the inside.

If, like me, you have ever felt resistance towards your appearance, try doing this. Say to yourself lovingly:

‘This is the face and the body I have been given. This is what I have. Right now, this is what I have. The life that sustains me exists within the walls of this body. Can I just be with that?’

Something about those words brings me peace and love and appreciation for all that I am.

It is my wish to make it very clear that I hold absolutely no resistance toward plastic surgery in itself. One may think that I would be ‘against’ it after what I went through, but that is not the case at all. Plastic surgery has played, and will continue to play, a role in assisting people to feel better about themselves. The only vital point that I desire for others to consider would be to make sure the decision to have surgery is coming from a place of absolutely no resistance. That is, you love who you are, you are at peace with who you are, life is going well, you are abundant, joyful, and thrilled with life and you don’t ‘need’ the surgery at all – you simply want to experience it.

I believe that when you release resistant thought and really feel love and appreciation for who you are as you are, the desire to changed what is ‘flawed’ may also be released.

Natalie Carey resides in Agnes Water, a small coastal town in Queensland. She is married and is the mother of a 12 year old daughter. Natalie is author of ‘30 Days Of Yes’, her diary of how to live a resistance-free life, which is available for purchase from her ‘resistance’ blog www.30daysofyes.blogspot.com

Contact Natalie via her blog or via Facebook www.facebook.com/nat.carey