May You Be Blessed
Tuesday January 2, 2007
Affirmative Project: Day 2
Keeping in a positive vein, Jean Seymour, one of my forum moderators sent me this link May You Be Blessed and it is a keeper! Thanks Jean.
My mother recently shared with me a suggestion given in her minister's sermon. She is a member of a Mennonite church. Everyone in the congregation was given an elastic wristband to wear. They were asked to wear it until the next week's church meeting. They were instructed to remove the wristband from their wrist and place it on the other wrist anytime they criticised something, another person, or put themselves down in a negative way. Throughout each day and until the following week they were to keep switching the band from one wrist to the other each time a critical voice or thought erupted from them. The idea was to demonstrate just how often criticism rears it ugly head. This might be an interesting experiment to try. Although, I wonder if the repeated action of removing the bracelet would involve focusing on criticism too much. You know, the Law of Attraction theory that we attract what we focus on. Maybe doing it just for a day or two to bring awareness of critical patterns would be okay. Then reverse it, switching the band everytime you feel blessed or grateful. Even better!
My First Affirmative Project Challenge: Staying Positive When I've Been Robbed!
I received an email from a friend of mine reporting to me that she had discovered a copyright infringement of one of my articles. Annoyingly, this happens fairly frequently. I never know quite how to feel about it. I mean, I guess it could be considered a backhanded compliment. Someone liked what I wrote enough to reprint it on their Website or blog. In this case it was a MySpace.com blogger who was my offender. Copying my content is not a compliment. It's a form of stealing, ya know? Anyway, the email conversation between my friend and I went like this...
Friend: Another MySpacer is ripping you off. :-( (she also included the rip off link in her email so I could go see for myself)
Me: "How the heck am I suppose to stick with my new year's resolution to "stay positive" when this stuff happens?"
Friend: "I think you can stay positive. Protecting your work and contacting people in the respectful way you do is positive. If you were being nasty or obsessing on it, that would be negative, but you're not."
Me: "Okay... that makes sense. It's the 'icky' feeling I get every time I see someone helping themselves to my stuff that I want to rid myself of."
Friend: "I understand that. Is it kind of a violated feeling? If so, can you turn it positive by doing what you can, then turning it over to the universe?"
After that short email exchange I just let it drop. I decided to deal with the problem later in the day and continued working on other things (more positive things!). Later on, I heard that nagging voice in my head telling me to address the copyright fraud issue. So, I clicked on the link to the offending blog so that I could send an email to the blogger to tell her I'm glad that she likes my article and also to inform her that what she did was not acceptable and to ask her to make a change. Reprinting my article in its entirety without obtaining reprint permission from About.com goes against federal copyright law, About's User Agreement, and in her case, MySpace.com Terms of Use Agreement. I don't enjoy contacting people and asking them to either remove my article or to please clip it short and include a link back to the original article. No matter how polite or friendly I try to be explaining the situation sometimes I am met with anger or attitude.
Anyway, when I clicked on the link the page came up saying that the MySpace account was private. Hmmm... I had seen it earlier in the day, why was I now being blocked? As it turned out, my friend decided to contact the blogger on my behalf to help free me from my "icky feelings." How nice!
I guess my friend's email upset the gal enough that she had quickly closed down her blog so that only her network of friends could read it. This was a temporary action though. Later on the blog was once again available for public viewing. As of now my article has been clipped with a note at the bottom that reads:
"The rest of this article is to be found at the above site on the internet...I have been informed about copyright laws...and wouldn't want to get in trouble...although, most healers see healing as a gift to the world-detached...hmmm..."
Double Crap... now I get to be judged. Her attitude is an old song I've heard before. Healing is a gift so there should be no fee and with her additional lyrics, my writings about healing should be free for anyone to copy too. I don't think so! Actually, anyone is free to read my articles from the Internet, just please read them on my site so that I can be compensated by multiple page views. I wish to live an abundant life and be rewarded for my efforts. Thank you very much.
photo credit: © Jupiterimages
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What is the Affirmative Project?
Daily journal postings beginning January 1 focusing on my New Year's resolution "I resolve to live in a more affirmative light in the coming year."
Affirmative Project Daily Posts
Keeping in a positive vein, Jean Seymour, one of my forum moderators sent me this link May You Be Blessed and it is a keeper! Thanks Jean.
My mother recently shared with me a suggestion given in her minister's sermon. She is a member of a Mennonite church. Everyone in the congregation was given an elastic wristband to wear. They were asked to wear it until the next week's church meeting. They were instructed to remove the wristband from their wrist and place it on the other wrist anytime they criticised something, another person, or put themselves down in a negative way. Throughout each day and until the following week they were to keep switching the band from one wrist to the other each time a critical voice or thought erupted from them. The idea was to demonstrate just how often criticism rears it ugly head. This might be an interesting experiment to try. Although, I wonder if the repeated action of removing the bracelet would involve focusing on criticism too much. You know, the Law of Attraction theory that we attract what we focus on. Maybe doing it just for a day or two to bring awareness of critical patterns would be okay. Then reverse it, switching the band everytime you feel blessed or grateful. Even better! My First Affirmative Project Challenge: Staying Positive When I've Been Robbed!
I received an email from a friend of mine reporting to me that she had discovered a copyright infringement of one of my articles. Annoyingly, this happens fairly frequently. I never know quite how to feel about it. I mean, I guess it could be considered a backhanded compliment. Someone liked what I wrote enough to reprint it on their Website or blog. In this case it was a MySpace.com blogger who was my offender. Copying my content is not a compliment. It's a form of stealing, ya know? Anyway, the email conversation between my friend and I went like this...
Friend: Another MySpacer is ripping you off. :-( (she also included the rip off link in her email so I could go see for myself)
Me: "How the heck am I suppose to stick with my new year's resolution to "stay positive" when this stuff happens?"
Friend: "I think you can stay positive. Protecting your work and contacting people in the respectful way you do is positive. If you were being nasty or obsessing on it, that would be negative, but you're not."
Me: "Okay... that makes sense. It's the 'icky' feeling I get every time I see someone helping themselves to my stuff that I want to rid myself of."
Friend: "I understand that. Is it kind of a violated feeling? If so, can you turn it positive by doing what you can, then turning it over to the universe?"
After that short email exchange I just let it drop. I decided to deal with the problem later in the day and continued working on other things (more positive things!). Later on, I heard that nagging voice in my head telling me to address the copyright fraud issue. So, I clicked on the link to the offending blog so that I could send an email to the blogger to tell her I'm glad that she likes my article and also to inform her that what she did was not acceptable and to ask her to make a change. Reprinting my article in its entirety without obtaining reprint permission from About.com goes against federal copyright law, About's User Agreement, and in her case, MySpace.com Terms of Use Agreement. I don't enjoy contacting people and asking them to either remove my article or to please clip it short and include a link back to the original article. No matter how polite or friendly I try to be explaining the situation sometimes I am met with anger or attitude.
Anyway, when I clicked on the link the page came up saying that the MySpace account was private. Hmmm... I had seen it earlier in the day, why was I now being blocked? As it turned out, my friend decided to contact the blogger on my behalf to help free me from my "icky feelings." How nice!
I guess my friend's email upset the gal enough that she had quickly closed down her blog so that only her network of friends could read it. This was a temporary action though. Later on the blog was once again available for public viewing. As of now my article has been clipped with a note at the bottom that reads:
"The rest of this article is to be found at the above site on the internet...I have been informed about copyright laws...and wouldn't want to get in trouble...although, most healers see healing as a gift to the world-detached...hmmm..."
Double Crap... now I get to be judged. Her attitude is an old song I've heard before. Healing is a gift so there should be no fee and with her additional lyrics, my writings about healing should be free for anyone to copy too. I don't think so! Actually, anyone is free to read my articles from the Internet, just please read them on my site so that I can be compensated by multiple page views. I wish to live an abundant life and be rewarded for my efforts. Thank you very much.
photo credit: © Jupiterimages
----------------------------------------------------------
What is the Affirmative Project?
Daily journal postings beginning January 1 focusing on my New Year's resolution "I resolve to live in a more affirmative light in the coming year."
Affirmative Project Daily Posts
I think its great you share your personal experience here on the issue.
I’m a published author myself in holistic health and dreamwork psychology. Every so often it looks like someone has taken my ideas that I have developed through research and practice and used them without acknowledging my work as a resource for them.
Let me ask you, the wrist rings idea comes from the Menenites, right, as I read you? How do they get acknowledged?
My point is that as a writer I have to use a lot of other’s peoples ideas and values and cannot acknowledge everybody. I do my best for important sources.
If I got upset every time someone else takes some of my stuff, I would be a mess. So I use the image for myself that I am an educator helping raise the consciousness of the world. Thus I earn money on only part of my outreach to the world.
People do feel that because of the democratization of the Internet that information should be freely transferred as free, just as the air belongs to all of us, and the land should as well.
How do you respond to this?
Of course we writers work hard researching and organizing our information. We should be paid for this. And we should be respected and not caused grief because we are giving value to the world.
But the same world we serve is full of imperfect people, who either do not understand the values or are thieves.
I say to all this when I can, if you are going to use me, use me well!
-Strephon
Hi Strephon,
Thank you for your comments and questions. I hoped that my posting would not look like a “whine” about my writings being copied so freely. What I wanted to demonstrate is how “hurt feelings” can interfere with positive thinking.
But, it did open up a frank discussion, great!
You are right, we do live in an imperfect world. I embrace imperfection in general actually! I am completely aware than many people do not realize that copyrighted material on the Internet is protected by laws and terms of agreement, and are not to be reprinted freely. Often times people mistakenly think if they include the copyright information intact that it is free to redistribute.
The content that I write for About.com is licensed to them under a signed contract agreement with the company. About sets up the rules for reprint permissions. I don’t make those decisions. Believe me, most the time, I just as soon put my head in the sand and ignore it when I discover my work being reproduced so freely neely. I’m actually required to report copyright infringement and plagerism of my work whenever I become aware of it to the legal department
As much as I dislike confrontation, I prefer to give people a chance to remedy their actions by clipping the article to a shortened blurb and including a link to my original article. If they oblige then I don’t have to report any fraudulent usage. Best solution!
FYI – About Guides are compensated for their work via pageviews. As you know, compensation to authors of printed works in magazines, newpapers, and books is normally based on a one time fee or royalties.
In response to your question about acknowledging the Mennonites for the wristband idea. Ideas pass from mouth-to-mouth. In this case, from my mother’s mouth to my blog. I referenced the source as I knew it (my mother’s minister). I really don’t know if it was the minister’s original idea or not. But in this case, I did not “copy and paste” his whole sermon and plunk it into my blog. But, again, I get your point. I’ve also seen my ideas being embraced and presented in different twists. Ideas grow organically, this is only natural. A good idea is worth sharing. I don’t get my panties in a bunch over it… why would I?
I have in the recent last few months started to learn about the law of attraction.
I am in the process of retraining my thoughts to take the positive route at all times versus the negative.
As you mentioned in your discussion, it is hard to know how to deal with these thoughts when faced with a tough decision or pending negative impact. In one of the many CDs I listened to, it stated that we attract those situations by default. The CD by Jerry and Esther Hicks stated as we carry out our quest to send positive thoughts to attract positive thoughts situations like this will not come to us via default.
I am not sure if you’re friend actually did herself a favour but it worked out for you in this case. Anyway, my point here is that I am struggling with this as well. Some of it as a result of delayed default and sometimes not. I find it difficult to ‘switch’ the mood to happy when I am inundated with compounding thoughts. This makes me feel bad because I am so desperately trying not to go there. I realize this is a work in progress. But, in any event it is hard to re train the brain.
I have not read all your blogs on this topic yet but I am planning on doing so as I am trying to soak up every single piece of information or encouragement to keep me focused and in tune with like minded people. Thanks for this blog. EM
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