Conscious Life Journal: How has the acclaim of your books and being in the public eye changed you?
Pam Grout: It’s funny because some of my friends say, “Pam, you haven’t changed at all. You seem like the same old person.” There were times when I thought I should get a regular job because I was crazy enough to believe I could make a living and support my daughter as a single mom by following my dream of being a writer. So that’s one thing that changed. I don’t have that constant axe over my head. I’ve always believed in an abundant world, but a lot of people, like my mom, felt that pressure. Now people say, “Wow, she made the right decision to do that.” What’s wonderful is hearing from so many people and realizing that the world has become so much smaller. I’ve been asked to speak all over the world, which has made me realize that we’re all connecting on the internet and I’m finding so many like-minded souls out there. That’s very heartening, especially now.
CLJ: Isn’t that great? What an inspiration you are to all of us who are stepping up and stepping out away from the corporate world to blaze new trails.
PG: In a way, we’re all going to have to start doing that. The whole corporate thing has reached its peak, I think. There’s not going to be unlimited growth in that arena anymore. We all have to step up and do our own thing.
CLJ: Do you think that’s a manifestation of the shift in our collective consciousness?
PG: For sure. That’s what we’re seeing in the political arena—the last gasp of the old way that hasn’t been working very well. They’re struggling to hang on so they’re going to be bold and extreme. It’s a good sign that we’re getting a very clear vision of what we really do want. We want everyone to have prosperity. We want everyone to have everything that they deserve. We’ll never have complete freedom until we don’t need the big walls and barbed wire fences and all that. The biggest secret is that we all really love each other, but we’ve created this other hologram and we’re seeing it clearly and we see that it’s not working.
CLJ: In Living Big you talk about the journey beyond the boundaries of what you know and how to relinquish your fear. How do you teach people to make that choice? What do you say when they say they’re afraid?
PG: Our little minds like to stay busy and create all these fearful thoughts about our old patterns, looking for what’s wrong and trying to fix it. We spend a lot of time focusing on what is wrong. Being fearful has been a way to protect us in the past. It isn’t necessary anymore, but our minds are still wired that way. I’m a student of A Course in Miracles and it’s a matter of training your mind. I use the example in E-Squared of housebreaking a puppy. You keep taking it outside and showing it a different reality. So I say to the Holy spirit, “Holy spirit, help me see this differently.” And my Course in Miracles lesson today is “I have invented the world I see.” Where can I fix that but on the inside? I have to clean up the parts of myself that are fearful or that might be doing the things that people out there are doing. I’ve been relying a lot on the Holy spirit the last few months. But it does work. To hang onto the truth, you have to be shown a way to see it differently.
CLJ: It requires a certain level of consciousness to even know that you need to say, “Holy Spirit, help me see things differently.” How do you help people develop that practice?
PG: I talk a lot about frequency in Thank and Grow Rich. It’s so important to get on the frequency of joy and gratitude. A lot of people will discount gratitude. “Yeah, we’ve heard about that before.” But it’s so powerful. When you start looking for all of the things that are going right and you literally start counting your blessings, then you’re more receptive because there really are an infinite number of possibilities out there. Anything can happen at any moment. But because we condense the reality of what we think we’re looking for, we see exactly what we expect to see. Whatever’s hanging out in your consciousness will be out-pictured in your life. That’s why it’s really important to look at what you’re seeing out there and begin cleaning up those places inside that are out-picturing things that look scary.
As I did that, my ability to recognize beautiful things increased, which allowed the universe to deliver to me more prosperity. So it’s really powerful to start focusing on what is going right. I think that’s an easier way, a simpler way, to get your mind to see all the beautiful things that are out there.
CLJ: Does this tie in to what you call the “Field of Infinite Possibilities”?
PG: I call it the Field of Infinite Potentiality (FP). Some people call it God. Quantum physicists call it the field. It doesn’t matter what we call it. What matters is that we start applying it and using it in our lives in a way that benefits us and brings us happiness and joy and a good world for everybody. There really are unlimited possibilities, but we only see that which we’ve allowed in and that’s why I often ask the Holy Spirit to see it differently. Help me see more, help me see the beauty, help me see truth. Otherwise, I’m just going to see a condensed version of how I’ve decided the world is.
CLJ: Are the experiments in E-Squared part of the breakthrough in that ability to help you see beyond yourself?
PG: I think the message “ask and ye shall receive” has been out there for a long time. What I did in the book, and why it became so massively popular, was to put this into practice. Let’s put it out there and see it with our own two eyes. So I challenged people; I gave them a specific time period. The experiments in the first book were forty-eight hours. When you’re looking for something in forty-eight hours, it’s going to show up for you. You can say theoretically that I know that the world loves me and there are blessings out there. But we’re not talking theory, we’re talking “let your little eyeballs notice it” in your world. It hasn’t changed the FP; it just changes our relationship to it. It enables us to see it. That’s why the experiments are powerful. The spiritual principles have been out there for a long time, but I set them up in the form of scientific experiments: this is my hypothesis, so if this is true then this will happen. Then people try it out and see it in their own lives. They’re fun experiments, there’s nothing difficult about them, and people had all these miracles. I get such a kick when I open my email and get a message like “you are never going to believe this,” and I do believe it because I know the way the world works. Whatever little tinge of doubt I might have had is completely gone because I get way too many of these stories to have any doubt whatsoever.
CLJ: Do you hear from people who say they tried and didn’t get any results?
PG: I do. That’s why I wrote the book Thank and Grow Rich, a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy. I say in the first chapter that this is a book for them.
Did you see the movie A Few Good Men where Tom Cruise has Jack Nicholson up on the witness stand? “I need the truth. Did you order a Code Red?” And finally, Jack Nicholson gets so mad he says, “You can’t handle the truth!” That’s what Thank and Grow Rich is all about. Until we can get our joy channels onto that frequency of joy and appreciation, we can’t handle the truth—the truth of all the love and bounty and beauty that’s out there. I also have blog posts called “Let the Universe Do the Heavy Lifting” where I talk about how we make an intention and immediately jump in and try to make all these things happen which really blocks the FP. One example is “I want a million dollars so I’m gonna win the lottery.” That’s fine, and you may win the lottery, but you’re putting handcuffs on the FP. The FP is totally abundant and wants to bless you as much as you’re able to take in with your consciousness. To say you want to win the lottery is just one avenue, and the FP has an infinite number. We can’t even get our minds around infinite.
CLJ: So our mind limits the universe’s ability to give back to us.
PG: Exactly. That’s it in a nutshell.
CLJ: Are there steps that you give people to help them open more and move toward that greater ability in a methodical way?
PG: The thirty-day experiment in Thank and Grow Rich is what I call my A.A. 2.0 program. The first step is I get up every morning and say, “Something amazingly awesome is going to happen to me today.” So before you even get out of bed you make the intention that something really cool is going to happen. The second thing I do is I text three blessings to my Possibility Posse—three amazing things that happened to me from the day before. The one rule is that you can’t do repeats. I’ve always been big on “Oh, I love my daughter, oh, I love my career.” But each day has to be something new and unique. It only takes a minute or two in the morning, but it sets me on this path and gets me on this frequency. When I get off the path, I go back and say, “Holy Spirit, help me see this differently.” In the beginning, when I was trying to change my thoughts, I was appealing to the Holy Spirit pretty much every five minutes. But you get better and better at it as you practice it more often.
CLJ: So it circles back to that personal responsibility. Nobody’s going to do that for you. You must choose to do that for you. Is there anything new and juicy for you that I can share with my readers?
PG: I just turned in the manuscript to my new book Art and Soul Reloaded about creativity and spirituality. That will come out in August. This year I’ve got several workshops that I’m giving all over—the Philippines in March, Switzerland in October, and quite a few here in the US. But the most exciting news is a few years ago I wrote a TV series set in an intentional community called Milagro Springs. I jokingly call it “Sex in the Country” because the six characters live in this eco village out in the country with hot springs, and people come in to do yoga classes and all this kind of stuff, which is where the interaction happens. Now that so many people are reading my books—from Hollywood and all over—I’m going to polish up the script and send it out and try to sell it. I made the intention to do that and the next day I got a LinkedIn request from a guy that is the head of Netflix, and I thought, oh, that’s interesting. It’s funny how the universe works.